Brazil is set to sack Culture Secretary Roberto Alvim after his video was posted on the ministry’s Twitter page that has gone viral causing a huge outrage as he used parts of speech that were used by infamous Nazi Germany’s propaganda leader Joseph Goebbels.
Released on Thursday, the video announced prizes for heroic and national art which quickly goes viral due to using wordplay similar to Goebbels. An anonymous source tells Reuters that the government plans to remove him from the office which was informed to the congressional leaders.
Alvim a former theatre director was appointed last year by President Jair Bolsonaro who was a far-right leader. He has now been urged to fire Alvim. Alvim was also a former army captain who was filled with a conservative social agenda and claimed that artists and cultural productions(schoolbooks and movies) were filled with left-wing bias.
He announced the prizes while music played in the background which was Hitler’s favourite music from Wagner Opera. During the six-minute video detailing National Arts Awards, Alvim tells that next decade Brazilian art would be national, heroic and imperative.
His speech was similar to that of Goebbel’s who was the propaganda boss of Hitler. He then told theatre directors during the Nazi regime that German art in the coming decade would be heroic, wildly romantic, objective, free of sentimentality, national with great pathos and equally being imperative and binding.
Alvim on Facebook claims that this similarity is just mere rhetorical coincidence with one sentence being similar to that of Goebbels and he would never dare quote Goebbels. He also said that the whole speech was based to create a nationalistic ideal for Brazilian art. Yet he even added that this phrase was perfect as heroism and aspiration of people is what he was looking for in national art.
