Brazil fires top culture official
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Outrage rained on Brazil’s government from across the political spectrum after the culture secretary used language similar to that of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in launching an arts initiative focused on nationalism and religion, leading President Jair Bolsonaro to fire him Friday.
The parallels between Thursday’s remarks by Roberto Alvim, who had held the culture post only since November, and those of Goebbels in the 1930s drew irate reactions from Jewish organizations, key lawmakers, political parties, artists and Brazil’s bar association.
Bolsonaro is normally defiant in the face of criticism, but he quickly removed Alvim. The farright president, who often celebrates torturers and killers of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship, also denounced Nazism and authoritarian regimes in a Twitter post.
Though the government is strapped for cash, Bolsonaro had announced Alvim’s $4.9 million arts initiative to foment the production of literature, theater, opera, music and other arts.
Alvim, a born-again Christian who found renewed faith while recovering from cancer, delivered a separate message about the initiative using a phrase that local media identified as a paraphrase of a 1933 speech by Goebbels. Website Jornalistas Livres first detected the comparable quote in Peter Longerich’s popular biography on the Nazi propagandist, referenced as a speech to Germany’s theater scene at the time.
“The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and will be national,” Alvim said in the middle of his speech. “It will yield great capacity of emotional involvement and it will be equally imperative, as it will be deeply committed to the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing.”
In his 1933 speech, Goebbels said, “The German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be steely romantic, it will be factual and completely free of sentimentality, it will be national with great Pathos and committed, or it will be nothing.”
Alvim, who has disavowed Nazism, acknowledged the similarity but said it was merely a “rhetorical coincidence.” After his firing, Brazil’s culture secretariat removed the video of his speech, saying that was done “in respect to all citizens who felt offended by its content.”
In reaction, the president of Brazil’s lower house said on Twitter that the video went beyond the pale and that Bolsonaro should remove Alvim from his position immediately. Davi Alcolumbre, the first Jewish president of Brazil’s Senate, said the video was “shockingly Nazism-inspired.”
Bolsonaro said in a statement that Alvim’s comments constituted “an unfortunate pronouncement, even though he apologized, that made it unsustainable for him to stay.”
While the amount to be spent on the new program is a drop in the bucket compared to other arts funding, the project jibes with the government’s other efforts to overturn what Bolsonaro calls “cultural Marxism” and some of his ministers say is undermining society’s morals. The leftist Workers’ Party governed Brazil for 13 years until President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016.
More than 57 million people — 55% of the voters in 2018’s election — embraced Bolsonaro’s anti-leftist campaign, in which he promised to fight corruption, violence and leftist ideology with the same energy.
In his video Thursday, with a wooden cross atop his desk Alvim said he wanted 2020 to mark a historic cultural rebirth to “create a new and thriving Brazilian civilization.”
He sat beneath a framed picture of Bolsonaro, and orchestral strings played lightly in the background. The music was from an opera by Richard Wagner, sometimes associated with Nazism and German nationalism. Alvim said in a radio interview that he chose the music himself, because the composer’s work is transcendent and stemmed from his Christian faith.
“Alvim’s speech is dangerous for many reasons. Firstly, due to the fact that it made a very direct and shameless apology to Nazism,” former culture minister Marcelo Calero said. “After that, the aesthetics: It’s a Nazi-fascist aesthetic that the video evokes.”