A Duped Lady Lies and Replies to Arnold

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In last week’s post, in both footnote and main body, I admired Arnold making a video-talk to address Russians. This week a young lady carefully wearing an old sports jacket, with the sleeve signed by Arnold Swartzenegger, has attempted a Russian propaganda counter-video to Arnold’s successful one. I am disgusted. 

Last week I said Arnold’s video could be taught in a college English class. As for the young lady’s video, it could be shown too, as an example of failure. Arnold had previously made a “critical of Americans” video about the January 6 assault on the capital; he shines with authenticity. The lady speaks with a glaring insincerity, absolutely uncritical of Putin’s so-called “special military operation,” as if no apartment blocks were ever razed to rubble, while trying to copy the wisdom and winning formula of Arnold. For example, her “signed by Arnold” jacket was a rip off of Arnold holding up a blue cup that a Soviet athlete had given him.

Most likely a propaganda committee, off camera, was the brains, and they merely used the young athlete as the on camera “talent.” Or perhaps she scripted the video herself, doomed in advance to fail because she was immersed in an insincere system—nobody ever accused the Russians of being a naive people, the way folks accuse the Americans. Cynical and hopeless maybe, walking with their heads down, but not naive.

Fish don’t see water, and I don’t suppose young Russians realize how much they are surrounded by the Kremlin’s lies. One would hope that athletes would be more open minded from their travels, but I don’t think so, not Russians. I remember when I was in the Canadian armed forces, guarding a training facility for gymnastics for the Olympic Games, the Games following the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. My peers pointed out that when a Soviet girl came outside to rest against a wall for fresh air and a break, a man in a track suit came outside too. People from the “workers paradise” were not to be contaminated by talking to westerners, let alone be allowed to defect.

It was after a later Olympics that Canadian actor John Candy, during filming for Silent Running, about the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team, came to our children’s hospital and gave out some swag. My niece got a hat, but then idealistically gave it back to one of Candy’s buddies, to the disappointment of her mother. Candy arrived with some peers because that’s what you do, if only because Candy could not hold much swag in his arms—and really, his arms should be free to shake hands and hug children. 

The lady with the video kept harping on how Arnold, while far away from the Donbas, had handed off a Donbas classroom’s drawings and prose to one of his “assistants,” and she kept harping that he should read the prose, even though it was from 2015—my mother wouldn’t keep my fridge drawings from that long ago.

Arnold spoke from his heart; the lady seems to be following a propaganda script in a monotone. This strikes me because I’ve seen young people go on Tik Tok and Youtube, and the last thing they would ever do is have any monotone. In the lady’s telling, she said would go back to the Donbas part of Ukraine, a Russian-speaking part fought over since Crimea was annexed by force. In the unlikely event she does “return”—or has ever been there even once, (although she claims multiple visits to schoolchildren)—she will find the Russian-speaking Ukrainians are angry at the Russians for their bombs and rubble and deliberate killing of civilians, crying, “We did not need rescuing!”

All of the people, regardless of language, are Ukrainian now. That’s one thing Putin has done: united the people with a hatred and contempt for him and his propaganda. 

After 75 years Ukrainians have long ago stopped hating their German neighbours. It may take them another 75 years to have any respect for Russia.

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Sean Crawford

Where the people democratically voted against hosting another olympics,

March

2025

Update: Having re-watched the lady, and seen some “smoking gun” lies, I doubt she was duped.

Some dude on CBC: “No one who is rational believes anything the Russians say.”

Footnote: from Arab News with both of the videos mentioned above embedded, and a NATO video too, comes a story (link) Russia attacks Arnold Schwarzenegger appeal video

Sidebar: A few people somehow “blame” the west for caring a lot about Ukraine but not so much about Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. 

Besides “racism,” I would answer: The Yemen fighting, and I admit I’m confused, was about a tribe or ethnic group in western Yemen wanting to separate and take territory; in Syria the people in the eastern part of the country, including everyone in the president’s clan, supported the government against the rebels; in Afghanistan some people were “for” the Taliban, including everyone in the Taliban tribe, and that no one, not even in the army, was “against” the Taliban enough to take up arms. Whole armies melted away.

Civil wars are confusing to outsiders. Take the US civil war. The reason every 1860’s European government, without exception, supported the Confederacy—and were prevented from buying cotton and supplying goods only by the Union blockade and fear of postwar retaliation— is: “The side of the angels is seldom self evident.”

The folks who accuse, “What about Yemen” were likely the very same folks who didn’t care much about the Russian-speaking Donbas area fighting for years after Crimea was annexed. Years. Such are civil wars.

Now Ukraine has a united people without tribes and clans. Now the West has no excuse for self-weakening doubts and confusion: This international invasion is a time when Good and Evil stand clear and unmistakable.