Brazil’s Culture Secretary Has Been Fired After Quoting Joseph Goebbels in a Chilling Speech That Sparked Immediate Outrage

The culture secretary of Brazil has been fired
after releasing a video on Thursday announcing a
multimillion-dollar investment in culture—by quoting Joseph
Goebbels and playing one of Hitler’s favorite songs.

A few minutes into the speech, secretary of culture
Roberto Alvim said, “The Brazilian art of the next decade will be
heroic and it will be national, it’ll be endowed with great
capacity for emotional involvement and deeply committed to the
urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing.”

The line is a slightly modified version of a Goebbels
quote most likely taken from a biography of the Nazi propaganda
minister by Peter Longerich, which was published in Brazil in
2014, according to the publication Journalistas
Livres.

The original quote reads: “The German art of the next
decade will be heroic, it will be steely-romantic, it will be
factual and completely free of sentimentality, it will be national
with great pathos and committed, or it will be nothing.”

The video also featured music
from Lohengrin, Adolf Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera,
which the Third Reich dictator even mentions by name in his
autobiography, Mein Kampf.

The outrage after the release of his video was
immediate. “It is outrageous and extremely revolting to see
the rise of Nazi speech supported by the agenda of a far-right
government in Brazil,” Rodrigo Moreira, a Brazilian visual artist
based in New York, told Artnet News.

Reactions across social media were similar. “What
is next? Are Brazilian forces getting ready to invade Poland?”
asked Rodrigo Zeidan, a business professor and Brazilian newspaper
columnist, on Twitter.

In response to the criticism, Secretary Alvim took to
Facebook hours after releasing the
video to call any similarities to Goebbels’s words “a rhetorical
coincidence.”

“There is nothing wrong with the phrase,” he wrote.
“The whole speech was based on a nationalist ideal for Brazilian
art, and there was a coincidence with a phrase from a speech by
Goebbles… I did not quote it and never would.”

But by Friday morning, he was fired from his post,
according to the Rio Times.

Alvim, a theater director, pledged last July to create
a “cultural war machine” against progressive
ideas. “I did not invent the cultural war,” he told AFP. “It
has been brutally waged by the left for at least 30 years.”

Last April, after visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem
Holocaust memorial, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro claimed
that Nazis were leftists and that Holocaust crimes could be
forgiven. In October, he was accused by
anthropologists of encouraging a genocide against
Brazil’s Indigenous peoples after one of the country’s leading
experts on isolated and recently contacted groups was
abruptly dismissed from Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency without
reason.

And last January, Bolsonaro disbanded his country’s
culture ministry, folding it into the ministry of citizenship.

“It’s a very dark time in Brazil,” Pedro Mendes, of
the Brazilian art gallery Mendes Wood DM, told Artnet News.

In December, we reported that the
leader of Brazil’s government arts agency, Dante Mantovani, is
known as a conspiracy theorist.

The post Brazil’s Culture Secretary Has Been Fired After
Quoting Joseph Goebbels in a Chilling Speech That Sparked Immediate
Outrage appeared first on artnet News.