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World

Brazil's culture secretary fired after echoing Nazi ideologue

2020-01-19 09:15:43

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's National Culture Secretary Roberto Alvim was fired on Friday after making a speech echoing Adolf Hitler's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

In a video aired on Thursday, Alvim talked about Brazil's "nationalist art" in terms very similar to Goebbels' speech on the same subject in 1933.

Alvim said Brazilian art would be "heroic", "national", "committed" and "imperative", or else it "will be nothing" -- all the expressions were used by Goebbels when talking to theater directors during the Nazi regime.

In addition to the similarity in words, Alvim also used the opera "Lohengrin" as the background soundtrack, a work by German composer Richard Wagner who was promoted in the Nazi era as one of Hitler's favorite composers.

Alvim said he did not know Goebbels' speech and attributed the similarity to a "rhetorical coincidence."

After the speech sparked outrage in Brazil, the office of President Jair Bolsonaro announced Alvim's dismissal in a statement on Friday, saying "an unfortunate statement, even though he apologized, made the secretary's tenure unsustainable."

Bolsonaro reiterated his rejection to "totalitarian and genocidal ideologies" and his support to the Jewish community in Brazil.

Editor:Jiang Yiwei