Brazil's Culture Minister Fired After Echoing Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Chief

Roberto Alvim set off a storm of outrage with comments about culture that were eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s propaganda chief. The Guardian, Jan. 17, 2020.

Brazil’s culture secretary, Roberto Alvim has been fired after he appeared to paraphrase the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in an online video to promote a national arts prize. “Brazilian art in the next decade will be heroic and national,” said Alvim, to the music from Wagner’s Lohengrin, said to be Hitler’s favourite opera, with a portrait of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and a Brazilian flag in the background.

“It will be endowed with a great capacity for emotional involvement and will be equally imperative, since it is deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing,” he continued.

The words are strikingly similar to those Hitler’s minister reportedly said to a group of theatre managers and directors in 1933: “German art in the next decade will be heroic, steely but romantic, factual without sentimentality; it will be nationalistic with a great depth of feeling; it will be binding and it will unite, or it will cease to exist.”



- Brazil's Culture Secretary Roberto Alvim

On Facebook, Alvim merely classed the phrase as a “rhetorical coincidence”. Since taking office last year, Bolsonaro has been repeatedly criticized by opponents for pushing a conservative Christian cultural agenda while cutting funding to arts and cinema projects. Bolsonaro’s culture war allies have lashed out at what they call “cultural Marxism” and condemned everything from climate change to feminism.

The latest effort, launched in the video by culture secretary Alvim, comes in the form of a $20m reais ($4.8m) prize fund for theatre, opera, art and music exhibitions, with conservative and religious themes prioritized. The video provoked widespread outrage across the political spectrum and calls for the secretary’s immediate dismissal.

Alvim, a born-again Christian, only took the job in November last year, and had previously been criticised for suggesting rock music encourages abortion and Satanism...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/17/brazil-culture-minister-goebbels-roberto-alvim-nazi

More, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51149224
'Goebbels led the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda, designed to brainwash people into obeying the Nazis and idolising leader Adolf Hitler. Its methods included censorship of the press and control of radio broadcasts, as well as control of culture and arts.'



- Goebbels (L) awards the Iron Cross to a 16-year old Hitler Youth member, March 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels