Dadaist ecology or performance?: six billion humans can be wrong. We interviewed...

Chris Korda

Founder and leader of the Church of Euthanasia

by José C. Cabezas

"I was born in New York and have lived in Boston for over 15 years. The details of my life are not relevant to what I want to say," says Chris Korda when someone asks about his private life. This would be understandable if it weren't for the fact that Chris Korda is not a typical character.

Korda has largely become known for releasing an album on the German label International Deejay Gigolo (an affiliate of Disko B). Both labels are well known for their penchant for constructing absurd stories around their artists and putting them on the sleeves of their albums. So when you read in the booklet for Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong that "the Church of Euthanasia is an educational foundation dedicated to restoring the balance between humans and all other species on Earth through voluntary population reduction," that "the only commandment is Thou Shalt Not Procreate," and that "sex is only practiced for pleasure, and if necessary, abortion is used," you can't help but think that it's all just another setup by those funny guys from Munich.

Well, it turns out he's serious.

A little internet research quickly unravels the mystery. It's all true. The Church of Euthanasia really exists (churchofeuthanasia.org) and Chris Korda is a real person. We find articles, interviews, videos, merchandising, photos, etc. Of course, it's the latter that catches our attention; it turns out that the Chris Korda on the album, the one who appears on the cover and in the photos of the Church's demonstrations, is a man, not a woman.

It's not that the act itself is something that has never been seen before. There have always been transvestites, and even more so in the world of entertainment. However, they have rarely gone beyond that. They rarely leave that world to take an active part in the real world (AIDS doesn't count - it's not real - it's just something you see on TV). Chris Korda has surrounded himself with a paraphernalia that combines electronic music, (anti-)art and the most provocative propaganda. Perhaps his ideas about overpopulation and the like are nothing new (nobody disputes that). The novelty lies in the staging, in the way of showing it, of attracting our interest. In an era in which we are submerged in an avalanche of information of such calibre that our attention span is completely exceeded, it is essential to dress the products in an appealing, and at the same time strident, way so that they stand out from the rest of the offers.

And if Chris Korda has done anything, it is to create controversy. In a society as puritanical and scandalous as the American one, Korda begins by attacking from within (almost always the most effective way) by creating a church whose four pillars are suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy (understood as any non-reproductive sexual act).

The species holocaust.

"We are witnessing a mass extinction of species. One species disappears every hour, four times faster if we are talking about tropical rainforests."

It's a bit far away, isn't it? Tropical forests are something we see on Channel 2, which makes us feel aware for a while, but which disappear as soon as we turn off the TV. The Amazon has nothing to do with us. Of the 10 to 15 million species that inhabit the earth, half live in tropical rainforests. A large part of these species are undiscovered and will become extinct without ever being seen. Rainforests are crucial. In a single tree there can be 1,200 species of beetles, of which about 300 are specialized in that particular kind of tree. Thousands are cut down every day.

But the Amazon is very far away from us, right?

"It has been estimated that before humans came, one species in a large group became extinct every million years. There have been five major extinctions in the geological history of the planet, including one that wiped out 95% of species. The most likely causes of all of these are astronomical (a comet hits the Earth, fills the atmosphere with dust, obscures the Sun, the planet freezes over...). Sooner or later, the cause of the extinction disappears: the dust settles on the ground, the ice thaws, and life is restored."

-And why should this time be different?

CK: The extinction we are experiencing now works differently. Unlike with the comet, the cause is not going to disappear, because we are the cause. We are changing the chemical composition of the planet, of the oceans and of the atmosphere. But humans do not yet have the power to completely destroy life on the planet. Even if we detonated all nuclear weapons at once, some of the bacteria and viruses would survive.

-Sooner or later, life would be restored again...

CK: Just because we can't destroy the earth all at once doesn't mean we can't do it slowly by reducing its biodiversity. Life creates diversity because it's an excellent survival strategy. Diverse systems adapt much better to change. Imagine a forest that contains ten thousand species. For some reason, the temperature changes a few degrees and half of those species disappear overnight. It's a full-blown extinction event, but there are still five thousand species in that forest that will be able to adapt to the new climate and evolve into new ones that will replace the extinct ones.

But now we cut down our hypothetical forest and plant it with just one species, something useful to us – corn, for example. The temperature changes again. What is the probability that our genetically modified corn can survive? Very low. The corn dies, the topsoil turns to dust from lack of activity, the wind blows it away and we have a man-made desert. Are we reducing the probability that life will continue on earth? Yes.

By reducing the number of species on Earth, we are creating a planet of weeds, with man as the ultimate weed . The only ones that will survive will be the genetically modified species that are useful to us (cows, chickens, pigs, corn, wheat, etc.). The rest will be rats, cockroaches, pigeons and other species capable of adapting to an increasingly hostile environment, created by and for man.

Save the planet, kill yourself.

-And what is the Church's position on Euthanasia?

CK: The history of industrial society is the history of diversity – both biological and social – leading to monoculture. The Church of Euthanasia fights for diversity and therefore opposes all forms of human growth, including economic and technological, but especially demographic. We want to see fewer people, using less stuff and generating less waste. The average person finds these goals deeply offensive and antisocial; they cannot help but be offended because their scale of values is based on Humanism, the belief that man is the measure of all things and that without him the world would have no value or meaning.

This arrogant idea leads directly to a hierarchical order of existence, with man at the top. God tells us in Genesis: "Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it and subdue (...) all living creatures." That is what we have done until now, with catastrophic results.

Humanism is the greatest heresy in the Church of Euthanasia, which could well be the first anti-human religion.

-But there doesn't seem to be much chance in this "holy war"...

CK: Humanism has been exported to every corner of the planet, and with it the mechanistic worldview. Kings collected taxes, built roads, established uniform codes of justice, turned forests into ships, and sent armies to distant lands to “collect.” Thanks to their efforts we now have Nike and Pizza Hut and an objective, standard, predictable world with divided and efficient labor. Since it is entirely impossible to reverse this course, the position of the Euthanasia Church is purely symbolic. We cannot stop humans from killing the Earth, but we can make them feel guilty about it. And we can also opt out. By not having children, consuming as little as possible, and finally by committing suicide.

-Do members of the Euthanasia Church have to commit suicide?!

CK: Of course not! However, if someone really wants to do it, they should wait until they are a member. That way, they automatically become a saint, without any paperwork. It is also important that they leave a note of thanks (or blame) to the Church and, if they wish, some kind of inheritance.

-And why haven't you committed suicide?

CK: Maybe I will. Believe me, I think about it every day. But maybe if enough people pay attention and stop procreating and consuming so much, we might be able to reduce the population and build a more sustainable future. That hope is the only thing keeping me alive; if it ever dies, I'll die with it. The question is how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice for the rest of the species on the planet and for future generations?

Purity is for losers.

The Church of Euthanasia's actions range from counterattacks to anti-abortion protests to (blind) tastings of human flesh outside supermarkets - being vegetarians, they suggest the consumption of dead humans for those who do not want to give up meat. Their more subtle attempts (such as the Snuff It fanzine or the CD) get, however, much more media coverage.

According to Korda, any press for the church is good press. His website lists all the articles that have been written about him, whether positive or negative. Chris Korda has nothing to hide. The son of Michael Korda, editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and grandson of one of the architects of the British film industry, Korda began experimenting with gender roles a decade ago. For those who know him personally, this is all common knowledge. However, it is something he does not usually talk about in interviews.

"Looking back, I think cross-dressing was the beginning of an attempt to balance myself internally, in a psychological sense. Specifically between my masculine and feminine poles, but also in other ways. I worked imitating Paris Is Burning-style women and even participated in drag-queen contests. I never got past second place; I couldn't compete with street queens who had nothing else to earn or go back to prostitution or drugs."

-Have you ever considered sex change surgery?

CK: Yes, of course. We barely survive childhoods of harsh conditioning. Many people are severely damaged and never recover - this is how the proletarian technological society is perpetuated. I think it was in realizing the "discomfort" I was experiencing with my gender that I began to progress towards balance. And in trying to balance myself internally, I began to realize all the imbalances in my environment. The answer is logical: I gave up the idea of surgery because it is the typically Western, patriarchal, interventionist, invasive solution to a problem that cannot be solved that way. You go to the doctor complaining that you feel trapped in an extreme gender role and the doctor says, "Well, if you have $30,000 and a very high tolerance for personal pain and suffering, and two or three years to spend on this, we will gradually introduce you to another gender role. Opposite, but equally extreme and ridiculous."

-But, didn't you have surgery?

CK: I think it's a shame that so many people succumb to it when what they really want is... ambivalence, balance, being in a point between the genres - where we should all be - giving up the extreme and embracing subtlety and ambiguity.

Cross-dressing is imitating the opposite gender, and that's positive, but the next step is gender-bending, occupying the space between genders. There are people like Dennis Rodman, the basketball player, who had the courage to do it while being a member of one of the most famous teams in history. And he did it in public. It was quite surprising.

-Do you find these types of attitudes positive?

CK: Well, there are a lot of grey areas. It's one of the main ideas of the Euthanasia Church: Nothing is all good or all bad. Even though something may be harmful in one way, it may also be beneficial in another.

The same can be said of their propaganda methods. Proclamations like Save the planet, kill yourself are double-edged swords. They are very powerful, but they can send the wrong messages to the public. And even more so when that public is - for the most part - neither accustomed to nor prepared to read between the lines.

Propaganda, situationism and Dada.

"The essential function of all modern propaganda - newspapers, magazines, books, television, movies, the Internet and every other imaginable medium - is to convince us, at every moment, that there is only one right way to live. Sustaining this illusion consumes vast amounts of resources, which is why the content and information industry is now the largest and most profitable in the world. Escapist dramas like Star Trek try to convince us that thousands of years from now, people will live comfortable lives with hot showers and slaves to cook for them. Disney spends billions of dollars on "historical" films in which our ancestors wear strange clothes but act like us and even talk like us. There is very little chance that we could understand our ancestors or their tribal behavior. Just as little chance that they could understand ours."

-However, the Church of Euthanasia agreed to participate in a mass program like The Jerry Springer Show. Isn't it contradictory to use the same media that you criticize?

CK: We are not required to be consistent, or to make sense. In fact, we often are not. All we have to do over and over again is to break through the blockage that prevails in people's minds and tells them that things can continue as they are. We are here to interrupt that current that drags us along and the tactic that works well at a given moment is the one we will use. If it helps to be rational, we will be rational. If it helps to be irrational, we will be irrational.

-And how could appearing on such a frivolous programme help you?

CK: First of all, we were offered to be on it. Also, its audience is predominantly poor, black housewives who are very, very likely to have children. They are a very important target for us. On the other hand, I prefer tabloids to so-called respectable or mainstream formats, because they are much less censored and you can say – more or less – what you want, as long as you are not boring.

-But in the program you were treated as a kind of suicide sect and that could overshadow the ecological content of your message...

CK: We are not one thing. We are a ministry of propaganda. We do what is most effective at the moment. The essence of situationism - and we are situationists - is to perceive the right place and time for an otherwise useless action to be very effective by unleashing a much greater force. In this particular case, we were able to manipulate a situation to our advantage. Jerry Springer did not expect to have intelligent guests; he had never had them before and he has not had them since.

"We live in an age where there is almost no meaningful communication. People have been trained to separate every bit of information they receive into convenient categories so that it can be assimilated and basically ignored. Most of the time we are not dealing with people but with their mental secretaries, who file, catheterize and sort everything into good-bad dualities.

"My goal is to destroy those categories as much as possible and present information that cannot be assimilated, that does not fit into those boxes. The best possible response to an action by the Church of Euthanasia would be 'What the hell are you doing?! I don't understand, explain it to me'. This is an ideal reaction because it would allow us to go in and make people start thinking for themselves about something they didn't think about before. We are looking, in a way, for a kind of deprogramming."

-But that is something that Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) was also looking for, for example, and it didn't help him much.

CK: The Unabomber published the whole truth, unvarnished. 30,000 words in the world's most widely read newspapers. And almost nobody read it. Most of those supplements ended up in the trash for two reasons. First, he had no entertainment value. Most Americans are incapable of reading 30,000 words on any subject, not even sports, much less the future of industrial society. Second, the Unabomber didn't realize that his audience had already been convinced that he was a lunatic, a serial killer, and that they could safely ignore anything he said.

These are serious propaganda mistakes that we are not committing.

In contrast to Chris Korda's seriousness, other members of the Church of Euthanasia, such as Vermin Supremo (one of its main activists), have a decidedly humorous attitude. "Of course we are serious, but the humor in the Church is undeniable. The Church's response to the collapse of industrial society is to create a Dadaist spectacle and take it to the streets, right under everyone's nose. This is a big part of what distinguishes us from others. There are so many cults to choose from, which one are you going to stick with?"

The cover of discord.

The German music magazine Beam Me Up did not share Vermin Supreme's sense of humour, however, and denounced Korda for anti-Semitism because of the original cover of Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong, which showed Korda himself naked, lying in front of the mouth of one of the crematoria at the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. The Church's response was not long in coming.

"Nationalists believe that one group of humans is superior to all others. Concentration camps are symbolic of what happens when this belief is taken to an extreme. Humanists believe that one species is superior to all others. This belief has also been taken to an extreme, with an equally predictable result: the extinction of at least a third of the Earth's species within a few thousand years.

"The Jews suffered terribly, but any sane person will admit that there are still Jews in the world. The same cannot be said of the millions of plant and animal species that have become extinct because of the human population explosion. Where are the symbols of this species holocaust? Where are the monuments to remind us that something shameful has happened and that - worse - it is happening every day, ever more rapidly? The Nazis stabilized the economy, built autobahns and restored national pride. Many Germans were grateful for this and avoided asking too many questions. It was better not to know where the trains went, because to know that would mean accepting blame or fighting the Nazis. Today, people in industrialized nations are in a similar position. There are more cars, computers and shopping malls full of stuff every day. It is better not to know where the oil comes from or where the garbage goes. Why spoil the fun?"

Ultimately, the album cover had to be changed in order to distribute the album in Germany (their record company is in Munich), something Chris Korda called "a tragedy, but it was necessary. Germany was the perfect place for that cover. Here in the States, almost no one would have understood it because there is not enough education to recognize the image. They would have thought it was a pizza oven."

Buy, consume, be happy.

"Governments have always been involved in drug trafficking. The British sold opium to China to pacify the population. The Americans smuggled cocaine from Central America to pay for the war in Nicaragua. They used heroin earlier to weaken hippies and students opposed to Vietnam. LSD-25 was a failed attempt at government mind control.

"The best forms of mind control appear to be voluntary behavior; controlling actions directly consumes too many resources (that was the main reason for the collapse of the Soviet empire). It is much more efficient to control thoughts and the best way to achieve this is with effective propaganda (like the American one, the most advanced in the world) that makes citizens believe they have total freedom, while behaving according to ideals shown on TV."

-What is the relationship between phenomena such as club culture and these types of social control methods?

CK: Club culture is a perfect example of propaganda in action. Like the missionaries of the Spanish empire, ravers travel around the world teaching doctrine and replacing social diversity with monoculture. Every club in every city is the same: people dressed the same, taking the same drugs and dancing to the same records, with the same lights and the same fog machine. The totalitarian slogan of the 1998 Love Parade – One World, One Future – could easily have come from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. A million standardised humans gathered around a phallic DJ tower, worshipping at the altar of homogenised techno-rave culture.

Signed by DJ Hell himself after accidentally buying his first EP in New York in 1997, Korda released his first album last year. His musical childhood began in 1977, when he studied piano, guitar and music theory with several excellent teachers (such as tenor Jerry Bergonzi). In the 1980s he played in swing, fusion and psychedelic rock bands and was a music teacher at a small conservatory. His first exposure to electronic music came with Vangelis and, later, with house (he mentions Black Box, Robin S. and The Orb).

He started making electronic music in 1993 with I Just Can't Let Go and that same year he released his first CD Demons in My Head, a "terrifying but beautiful" (in his own words) collage of ambient sounds. He then joined Gigolo where, now focused on electronic dance music, he released two EPs and, now, an album.

Six Billion Humans ... is hard to categorize. Produced by Korda himself, it presents an attractive mix of electronic music and propaganda designed as a mass consumption product (as mass as electronic music can be) and containing enough hooks to attract many and diverse audiences. On the one hand, collaborations such as those of Michelle Grinser, Richard Bartz or Hell himself, ensure the musical quality of the album. On the other hand, the content of antisocial, anti-consumerist propaganda -anti-everything in general- and the treatment of it are most attractive. Hypnotic repetitions of proclamations, perversion of mass slogans (the One world, one future of Love Parade '98 is transformed into a furious One world, one shit!) and hilarious cynicism in the lyrics. Three potential hits: Save the Planet, Kill Yourself in which Korda recounts the dream in which an alien intelligence (The Being), spokesman for the inhabitants of the earth in other dimensions, inspires him to create the Church of Euthanasia; Fleshdance, the first cannibal anthem aimed at dance floors, and Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong, in which the tremendous Chicks on Speed (another group on the border between art and music) take their anger out on capitalist society.

"My goal is to communicate profoundly subversive and antisocial ideas to as many people as possible. This can only be done by using the methods of Mass Society. To a certain extent, you are part of that apparatus. In a way, my goal is to convince you that my cause is a good one. To convince you enough that you will be willing to play along and make these ideas available to a larger percentage of the public. If I succeed in persuading you, I have succeeded. If, on the other hand, I convince you that I am either a nutcase or an object of entertainment, I have failed in my cause. Do you see the problem?

Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong is released by International Deejay Gigolo Records and distributed by So Dens.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.