Many suspected the extreme right of Brazil to have sympathies for the IIIe Reich. Thursday evening, with the broadcast of a video by the Secretary of State for Culture, directly inspired by Joseph Goebbels, they were served.
" Brazilian art for the next decade will be heroic and national. It will be endowed with a great capacity for emotional investment and will be just as imperative, because it is deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people … Or it will not be! "Roberto Alvim said in a recording posted on social networks, repeating several expressions from a speech given on May 8, 1933 by the head of the Nazi propaganda.
In the video, announcing the creation of an arts prize, the Secretary of State for Culture – the ministry has been abolished -, surrounded by a patriarchal cross, a flag of Brazil and a portrait of Jair Bolsonaro, is not content to borrow from the verb of Joseph Goebbels: hair plastered back, steel look, your grandiloquent tone, he singles out the style and even to the phrasing, calling for the birth of " powerful aesthetic forms », favored by " the virtues of faith, loyalty, self-sacrifice and the fight against evil ". In the background, the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, prized by Adolf Hitler, dispels the last doubts about the sources of inspiration of the speaker …
"Cultural war machine"
Friday's outcry was general across the country, particularly among the Jewish community. " Imitate the vision (from Goebbels) is a scary signal (…) Such a person cannot order to the culture of our country " condemned the Israelite Confederation of Brazil (Conib). An appeal quickly heard: pleading first a simple " rhetorical coincidence Alvim announced his resignation late Friday.
The pressure was too strong, coming from the influential president of the chamber of deputies, Rodrigo Maia, but also from the religious authorities and the Israeli embassy. No question for Mr. Bolsonaro to lose the support of his "friend" Benjamin Netanyahu: denouncing during the day of " unhappy words ", The head of state affirmed his "Rejection of totalitarian and genocidal ideologies" and his "Full and unrestricted support for the Jewish community".
At first, the president would have hesitated to drop his secretary of state, a controversial playwright, 47, who wanted to create a " cultural war machine In the service of its chef. Roberto Alvim is not the only controversial, if not enlightened, personality to hold high cultural positions. At the head of the National Library, we now find Rafael Nogueira, a convinced monarchist, who makes the singer Caetano Veloso responsible for illiteracy in Brazil. Even more wacky: the new president of the National Arts Foundation (Funarte), the conductor Dante Mantovani believes that " rock activates drugs, activates sex, activates the abortion industry which activates satanism ”…
