Quoting Joseph Goebbels in a Chilling Speech, Brazil’s Culture Secretary Announces a Multimillion-Dollar Investment in Nationalist Art

The culture secretary of Brazil released a video Friday morning 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 outrage was immediate on social media. “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 a few hours after releasing
his speech 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 the culture secretary’s critics point out that the
music in the video comes from Lohengrin, Adolf Hitler’s
favorite Wagner opera, which the Third Reich dictator even
mentions by name in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.

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 Quoting Joseph Goebbels in a Chilling Speech,
Brazil’s Culture Secretary Announces a Multimillion-Dollar
Investment in Nationalist Art appeared first on artnet
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