Sitting upright at his desk, the culture secretary addresses the nation. A triumphant portrait of the head of state hangs on the back wall, a national flag lies limp on a pole to the speaker’s right-hand side, and an obscure ecclesiastical two-barred cross sits to his left.
An excerpt from Wagner’s opera Lohengrin plays softly in the background, as the government official stares down the camera, speaking of how the nation’s art must be “heroic, national, with great emotional capacity.”
It is a scene that could be straight out of Nazi Germany—and in many ways, it was—but this occurred in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
On Thursday evening, the Brazilian Culture Secretary posted a six-and-a-half-minute video featuring department head Roberto Alvim, announcing a new wave of government grants for the arts, aimed at productions on Brazilian history, “aligned to conservatism in the arts.”
Social media reacted quickly to the publication, commenting first on the bizarre set design and the confusingly impassioned speech of Mr. Alvim, who took some three-and-a-half minutes not to introduce the impending government culture grants, but to gush about his plans for patriotic Brazilian art.
The more attentive viewers, however, quickly picked up on exactly where Roberto...
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