Brazil’s culture minister has been sacked after he made a video promoting nationalism and religion in art, using phrasing remarkably similar to that used in a 1933 speech by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Roberto Alvim, 47, who bears a passing resemblance to the German fascist, delivered the live Facebook broadcast from the library of the official presidential residence in Brasilia on Thursday.
Looking sternly towards the camera, with a large wooden cross behind him, he declared Brazilian art “in the next decade will be heroic” and “will be national . . . or it will be nothing” — exactly the same words used by Goebbels in a notorious speech he made calling on German artists to follow the “vision” of Nazism.
In