The Bolsonaro government has dismissed Secretary of Culture Robert Alvim just one day after he released a video that was influenced by Nazi propaganda in its content, tone, and aesthetics. Alvim paraphrased a speech by Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, in the video.
On the morning of Friday (17), the government told Congress that the secretary would be dismissed after the political class invoked severe repercussions and protests yesterday and this morning. Among those who asked for Alvim's departure are the head of Congress, Rodrigo Maia (DEM-RJ), and the Senate, Davi Alcolumbre (DEM-AP).
In the video, Alvim discloses the National Arts Prize, which was released moments before a social media live by President Bolsonaro in which he participated.
Alvim's speech, however, cites an excerpt from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, about the arts, prompting a wave of outrage on social networks.
"The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and national. 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," said Alvim in the video posted on social media.
"The German art of the next decade will be heroic, romantic, objective and free of sentimentality, national with great pathos and equally imperative and binding, or nothing," said the Nazi minister of culture and communication in an 8 October, May 1933, speech to theater directors, according to the book "Joseph Goebbels: A Biography," by Peter Longerich, published in Brazil by Objetiva.
In addition to the pronouncement excerpts, the video's aesthetics, the secretary's appearance, vocabulary, tone of voice, and chosen soundtrack also made several personalities compare disclosure to Nazi propaganda.
Alvim's speech made Goebbels's name one of the most cited on Twitter at dawn and caused hundreds of netizens to repudiate the Nazi reference and post comparisons with Hitler's propaganda.
At the Special Secretariat of Culture, Alvim initiated several controversies. This week, Alvim mocked the nomination for "Democracy in Vertigo" in the category of best Oscar-winning documentary film by saying that the production should be in the fiction category. Directed by Minas Gerais filmmaker Petra Costa, the film follows the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff from a particular view of the director.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon