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News > Brazil

Brazil’s Secretary of Culture Fired After Quoting Nazi Goebbels in Video

  • Brazil’s former Secretary of Culture Robert Alvim was fired Friday after quoting Joseph Goebbels.

    Brazil’s former Secretary of Culture Robert Alvim was fired Friday after quoting Joseph Goebbels. | Photo: Social Media - Time24

Published 17 January 2020
Opinion

As soon as the video came out on Thursday many soon realized it was largely influenced by Nazi propaganda in its content, tone, and aesthetics. 

Brazil’s former Secretary of Culture Robert Alvim was fired Friday after he released a video in which he paraphrased a speech by former Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. 

RELATED:
Brazilian Army Pays Tribute to Former Nazi Commander

"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," Alvim said in the video.

But as soon as the video came out on Thursday many soon realized it was largely influenced by Nazi propaganda in its content, tone, and aesthetics. 

The first thing was the paraphrasing of a speech made by Goebbels on Oct. 8, 1933, to theater directors, in which the later Nazi minister said that “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." 

Another indication was the aesthetics and background music used in the video, as the official sits under the picture of far-right Jair Bolsonaro while Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin opera plays in the back. 

Wagner was promoted during the Nazi era as one of Adolf Hitler's favorite composers and became a symbol of the Third Reich. 

Yet this is not the first time Bolsonaron’s government has been accused and proven to be sympathizing with Nazism. 

On July 1, 2019, the Brazilian Army paid tribute to a World War II German Nazi commander who was killed in 1968 in the South American nation. 

Alumni of the Brazilian Army's Command and General Staff School Major Otto Maximilian von Westernhagen (1923-1968) was recognized for his achievements in WW II, army officials said.

The former Nazi soldier was killed in 1968 in Rio de Janeiro by an alleged left-wing armed group, who mistook him for Bolivian Captain Gary Prado. Prado participated in the U.S.-backed capture and murder of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.

While on Oct. 8, 2019, two Nazi sympathizers were acquitted of charges of spreading Nazism in Santa Catarina, the Brazilian state where the first Nazi cell abroad was set up in 1928.

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