By Theodore Shoebat
Major Brazilian politician, Roberto Alvim, shocked many people in his country when he stood before a camera and to the sound of Wagner’s Lohengrin, made a speech that almost completely replicated the words of Joseph Goebbels:
“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”
The speech was a mimicking of Goebbels. All that Alvim did was replace Germany with Brazil and added some different words. Here is the Goebbels speech that he copied:
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”
The message was obvious enough: Alvim was fantasizing himself as Goebbels. As he was saying his speech behind him stood a portrait of Jair Bolsanaro, the president of Brazil. Bolsanaro admired Alvim who was appointed to be Brazil’s culture secretary, but due to pressure from both within and without Germany, Bolsanaro had to remove Alvim from his position. According to the Intercept:
Notably, Alvim was fired only after the embassies of Germany and, far more importantly to Bolsonaro, Israel issued condemnations containing harsh language rare for diplomatic communications. The Israeli Confederation of Brazil said: “Such a person cannot command the culture of our country and must be removed from office immediately.” The German Embassy in Brazil said: “The period of National Socialism is the darkest chapter in German history, bringing infinite suffering to humanity….We oppose any attempt to trivialize or even glorify the era of National Socialism.” The center-right presidents of the Brazilian Senate and House also demanded Alvim’s firing, leaving Bolsonaro with little choice. When announcing the firing, Bolsonaro called the speech “an unfortunate pronouncement.”
The New York Times also reported:
Mr. Alvim’s address included verbatim some phrases from Goebbels’s, including an exhortation to make art “in the next decade heroic.” It also includes the warning that Goebbels gave that if art doesn’t rise to the national moment, “it will cease to exist.”
In the background, Richard Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin” is playing, a work Hitler described in his autobiography as one that had been decisive in his life, according to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.
Announcing a $4.8 million investment in the country’s national arts grant program, Mr. Alvim, a veteran theater director, made clear the government would fund works that hew to Mr. Bolsonaro’s worldview, works that pay homage to historical figures and emphasize conservative values.
The arts grants would support operas, theater productions, painting and sculpture exhibitions, works of literature and music compositions.
Mr. Alvim said Brazil needed “a culture that doesn’t destroy, but one that will save our youth.”
“When culture is sickened, people become sick as well,” he said in a video recorded alongside the president, which was broadcast before the one that drew controversy.
By Friday morning, Goebbels and Nazi were trending topics on Twitter in Brazil as users shared news stories and memes expressing horror.
Over the years, one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of Right-wing intellectuals is their fixation on the arts, especially art from the Romantic period and Graeco-Roman art as well. They will revere Wagner and exalt the statues of ancient Greece and Rome, while condemning degenerate art. While they will say many true things about aesthetics and the decline of beauty and creative harmony, we must always be weary of the motivations of such people. In the example above, Alvim plays Wagner who, while a very famous composer of the Romantic period, was anti-Christian, pagan and demonstrably loving towards the Hindu religion. The admiration for older or more classical forms of art can be a very a good thing, but it can also be a mask for evil intentions, such as Euro-centric ideology or just blatant racism.
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