WOW. Impressed.
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Everybody is a mix of good and bad. And we should always be willing to recognize both. Just as the good does not “excuse” the bad, the bad does not eliminate the good. It feels like we are less willing to elevate people on to a pedestal where we refuse to see the bad things about them than we used to be; and that is a good thing. But we should also not decide that people are irredeemable and incapable of doing good. Evil acts are not washed away by good deeds, and it is a good idea to remind people of them when praising good deeds. But that does not mean that we shouldn’t praise good deeds no matter who does them.
This speech is very much of a pace with his speech about the “broken men,” that he grew up around. Perhaps it was growing up around former Nazis that helped him to see the complex mix of good and evil within individuals, rather than consign people as either “good,” or “evil.”
I’ve thought that Zelensky should try to press the idea that THIS time, it is the Ukrainians that are defending their homes from invaders, just as Soviets did in Stalingrad. But THIS time, the Putinites are playing the invaders.
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I understand it sounds shocking to you but for an Austrian or a German, it is just a fact of life that the overwhelming majority of our grandfathers were in the Wehrmacht and didn’t have much of a choice about it either.
Thankfully, my own grandfather was spared the most horrible experiences like Stalingrad and was not a „broken man“ as Arnie put it. But I completely get what he means by it. When a whole generation of people is part, with conviction or not, of something like the Nazis, it casts a long dark shadow.
What is happening in Ukraine right now are the seeds for decades of hate, mistrust, shame and repression.
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I think that we can contrast that with the American South of the 1880s when most confederate veterans still thought that they had fought on the right side, even if they lost.
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i get it, but it just seemed to me to be one of those things that people wouldn’t speak about unless it was in hushed tones and private conversations. I mean, my dad never spoke about growing up during the period of Japanese internment during WWII. Even though my family wasn’t placed in the camps (being too far inland), he must have experienced an incredible amount of racism at the time. it was just a painful period he never spoke about. It seems that it would be akin to that – something painful that the family knew, but never spoke about.
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I think it’s better for everyone to put all that dark shit out in the open. I loved Arnold’s appeal to the Nazis and Nazi-adjacent protesters marching in Charlottesville when he said
‘Growing up, I was surrounded by broken men… men who came home from a war filled with shrapnel and guilt. Men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you: that these ghosts you idolize spent the rest of their lives living in shame.’
‘And right now, they’re resting in hell.’
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The power of propaganda is amazing. My grandma knew that Nazism was wrong, but she still thought back fondly about her days in the Bund Deutscher Mädl. Membership there was mandatory btw, just as membership in the HJ was for boys.
Ukraine shows us that we can’t imagine in a free western country the level of indoctrination people in states like Russia or China still receive and how dangerous it is. Also that we shouldn’t be nonchalant about the quality of our own media information.
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My grandfather never spoke to me about the Nazi period either. Maybe he would have if I had I asked him but he died before I was old enough to do that.
The reality of it just could not be escaped here though, since just everybody‘s grandparents lived through it. It took up basically half of our whole history curriculum in high school.
So at some point, talking about it in a casual tone became natural. Which is what Arnie is doing here. He’s not glossing over it, to him it just is what it is.
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He’s already doing that.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has compared Russia’s brutal siege of the southern city of Mariupol to that of Leningrad in the second world war, amid fresh shelling in the capital Kyiv on Thursday and anger at the Kremlin after Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”.
Zelenskiy said late on Wednesday: “Citizens of Russia, how is your blockade of Mariupol different from the blockade of Leningrad during world war two? … We will not forget anyone whose lives were taken by the occupiers.”
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well, i agree, but it’s also true that people deal with trauma differently. apparently my dad would rather never discuss it, even though now i wish he had, so we had it in our family history. instead, what he went through is just a big question mark for us. I am sure that being open about it has helped Arnold deal with it and heal, and also attempt to create something good from it, like here.
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Of course, your dad also had nothing to be ashamed of so it was up to him to decide how he wanted to cope with that part of his past. Arnold’s family was coming at it from the opposite side of history, so I’m gratified when people like him have the integrity to stand up and say “what my country did was inexcusable, and my family’s role in those atrocities was shameful.”
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yeah, definitely different situations entirely, but i was thinking of it more from the “painful family history” perspective. i do think it’s great what Arnold is doing, and how he approaches it. it was just a shock to me at first.
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“Bring A Trailer”?
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A friend of mine said that the only “war story,” that his uncle told about his time in WWII was about the time fellow marine Jonathan Winters played with an invisible yoyo during some “hurry up and wait,” time.
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Bring a tractor.
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With his connections in Hollywood and Sacramento, he just needs to be smart enough to hire the world’s best speechwriters and then read what they give him
It’s possible he’s smarter than that—it’s even possible he writes all his own material, in English—but it’s hard for us to know from the outside
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Just like the politicians, whether or not he wrote it all by himself, when he gives the speech it is his message. And I think this is a solid message.
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Yeah, I notice he speaks of “the Kremlin” and “the leaders in the Kremlin” instead of blasting out putin putin putin. Only at the very end does he point to Putin. It seems very well thought out. Loyal Russian soldiers might tune out the rest of the message if he blasts Putin directly through the whole speech.
Re how he speaks of his own family history, just as there is no one “right way” that can be judged by anyone else to remember and share experiences (if one decides to) as victims, there is no perfect way to do so as descendants of the perpetrators. I’ve spent my adult life speaking matter-of-factly about human rights violations and lifting the spirits of victims by calling out the elephant in the room and, yes, making dumb jokes. This has cut the tension and led to lifelong friendships.
Transparency, acknowledgement of what happened, and a willingness to engage are more important to me than whatever vocalized emotion the words are supposed to be packaged in.
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