Brazilian Secretary of Culture Fired by Bolsonaro after Copying Nazi Speech

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL –  Brazilian Culture Secretary, Roberto Alvim, published a video on Thursday evening, January 16th, where he directly quoted from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, on the arts. The speech provoked angry responses on social media networks on Friday morning, January 17th, which led to Alvim’s dismissal the same day.

The video was posted by Bolsonaro’s Special Secretariat of Culture. The objective was to publicize the National Arts Award, presented hours before via live video, with the participation of the President himself.

We compare the two speeches below:

“German art in the next decade will be heroic, it will be ferociously romantic, it will be objective and free of sentimentalism, it will be national with great pathos and equally imperative and binding, or it will be nothing,” Goebbels said in a speech for theater directors, according to the book “Goebbels: a Biography” by Peter Longerich.

“The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and will be national. It will be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement and will be equally imperative, since it is deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing,” Secretary Roberto Alvim said in his video.

Form and content

The problems stem from not only his words, but also the aesthetics of the video, the tone of his voice, and the secretary’s appearance.  His vocabulary and the soundtrack also made several prominent people compare the dissemination to Nazi propaganda.

The background music used by Alvim is an excerpt from Richard Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin,” a work that Hitler mentioned in his autobiography as decisive in his life.

The secretary’s speech led Goebbels’ name to become one of the most mentioned on Twitter last night, and caused hundreds of Internet users to fiercely condemn the Nazi reference and post comparisons to Hitler’s propaganda.

President of the Chamber of Deputies Rodrigo Maia demanded the immediate resignation of the Culture Secretary. “The Culture Secretary has crossed all boundaries. It is unacceptable. The Brazilian government should urgently remove him from office,” Maia posted on Twitter.

The Israeli Confederation of Brazil (CONIB) released a note of repudiation of Roberto Alvim’s speech.

Latest update, January 17th, 11.45 am: 

President Jair Bolsonaro decided to dismiss the Secretary of Culture, Roberto Alvim, after the controversial references to Nazism on video reported on social networks. According to the government, Alvim’s situation became “unsustainable”.