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Brazilian culture secretary fired after echoing words of Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Göebbels

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  1. Kuromantis
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    “Brazilian art in the next decade will be heroic and national,” said Alvim, to the music from Wagner’s Lohengrin, said to be Hitler’s favourite opera, with a portrait of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and a Brazilian flag in the background.

    “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,” he continued.

    The words are strikingly similar to those Hitler’s minister reportedly said to a group of theatre managers and directors in 1933: “German art in the next decade will be heroic, steely but romantic, factual without sentimentality; it will be nationalistic with a great depth of feeling; it will be binding and it will unite, or it will cease to exist.

    On Facebook, Alvim merely classed the phrase as a “rhetorical coincidence”.

    Since taking office last year, Bolsonaro has been repeatedly criticized by opponents for pushing a conservative Christian cultural agenda while cutting funding to arts and cinema projects.

    On Friday afternoon, Bolsonaro tweeted that Alvim had been dismissed. “An unfortunate statement, though apologetic, made it untenable for him to stay on,” he said.

    The night the video was recorded, Bolsonaro had said of Alvim: “Now we have a real secretary of culture.”

    Alvim, a born-again Christian, only took the job in November last year, and had previously been criticised for suggesting rock music encourages abortion and Satanism.

    4 votes