> The Hitler stuff comes from Arnie himself - how he admires the guy, etc.
To be fair to Arnie, that Hitler quote thing seems to have been a smear job. The original quote from the shelved book proposal seems to have run:
"I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for his way of
getting to the people and so on. But I didn't admire him for what he
did with it."
The NYT ran this quote on Friday in their online edition, after George Butler, the guy who wrote the 1975 book proposal (and who went on to produce the documentary "Pumping Iron" instead) went back and checked his notes from 28 years ago.
The original article in the NYT (which ran the day before, on Thursday) was based on Butler's recollections, and it never had the full quote, just partial paraphrases of it which made it look much worse than it was.
Afaik, there is zero evidence that Schwarzenegger is a Hitler-lover or an anti-semite. He's got a million other bad qualities which should have precluded his being selected as governor, but I don't honestly think he has those.
If an American said the same sentences, they would probably come out "Hitler was evil, but there's no denying he was a great orator. It's pretty stunning to see those crowds." And it would be impossible to object to.
I think the reason Arnie's expression of the same sentiment sounds a touch more ambiguous has something to do with the very peculiar but distinctive pleasure many otherwise normal Austrians seem to take in being cheeky about Hitler. It's not (for vast majority of them) that they're Nazis. It's more because nazi war guilt has been such a huge and omnipresent taboo that they can't seem to help themselves from daring each other to poke at it.
So there's a tiny touch of ambiguity in it. But there's nothing in that quote you could hang a guy on. And there doesn't seem to be anything else in his (very public) life that corroborates it. They really had to dig down low to get this.
In addition, Peter Davis, one of the guys who did interviews for Pumping Iron, said that Arnie did say in an interview with him that his first hero had been Hitler -- but he was talking about when he was 5, and he was shaking his head in self-critical amazement. (His Dad, after all, was a Nazi. It takes a little time for a boy to assert himself.) Davis said Arnie went on to say he soon got over it and replaced him with his next boyhood hero, JFK.
Which change might well have set up classic adolescent confrontation with his Dad . . . I just suddenly remembered a scene from Pumping Iron, a movie I haven't seen for 20 years. During his final workout and diet period before a Mr. Universe competition Arnie's father dies, and he refuses to break off training for one day to go to the funeral. Nor does he seem to be the slightest bit upset. The interviewer asks him why and he says "He's dead now. I can't help him." The movie plays it as a sign of his obsessive single-mindedness, and his unwillingness to concede competitors the slightest edge. And I'm sure many viewers, like me, saw it as a sign of remarkable emotional shallowness.
But thinking about it now, another explanation which the movie doesn't touch on could simply be that he and his ex-Nazi Dad were extremely estranged by then and training was just an excuse.
Michael