Roberto Alvim, the culture secretary in Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s government, was fired on Friday after quoting Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in a video about the future of Brazilian art he had posted on Thursday.
Alvim announced national prizes to revitalize the arts, with music by Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner, playing in the background, in a video posted on an official government social media account, saying, “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 binded to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing,”
Goebbels, in a speech to theatre directors in 1933, said: “German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be like steel, it will be romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos, and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing.”
Social media users in Brazil jumped on the obvious case of copy-paste, which Alvim denied.