Boring propaganda doesn't work

14, July 1999

"Save the Planet, Kill Yourself" - What sounds like trash is a political message for radical vegan Chris Korda and his Church of Euthanasia, including anti-Semitism

The idea is not new: evolution made a mistake and created humans. And now humans are aborting all the other products of evolution. Musician Chris Korda disagrees. His Church of Euthanasia, which has several thousand members, is recognized by the US tax authorities as a non-profit educational institution and is headed by Reverend Korda, preaches the end of reproduction.

Sex is good, but the reproduction and expansion of humans brings nothing but misery. "Save the Planet, Kill Yourself" is one slogan. And that is also the name of a song on his new record. A record that has been praised by critics across all music magazines in recent weeks because it reconciles art rock à la Pink Floyd and electronic music in an astonishing way without falling into krautrock-like droning.

Korda's sounds are dense, quite rousing and make you want to dance. But it's not just the music that makes Chris Korda a pop star. If you visit the website of the Church of Euthanasia (COE), you get the impression that you're dealing with some really crazy weirdos, a kind of American vegan APPD.

The COE stands for public cross-dressing, especially Reverend Korda himself, who dresses as if he were his own aunt; the church demonstrates in front of sperm banks with a giant foam penis; it calls on posters to eat a homosexual fetus for Jesus; it waves swastikas at campaign events for a particularly conservative senator - to support him, mind you - because he is the only hope of fascist America. It spreads butcher tips on which parts of the human body are edible and which barbecue sauces go with them. It's really provocative, and pretty funny at first.

Just like the homepage, music is a vehicle for Korda to create a kind of political discotheque. "Electronic music is a widespread form of propaganda, it simply conveys content, at least if you assume a clever production. I cannot identify with the tired cliches of rock or punk that mass-market fake rebellion. The cornerstones of industrial society - industrialism, globalism, control - have not changed and will not change. I try to convince people to reduce their dependence on this form of society - for example by not reproducing - as a first step to freeing them completely. I am against politics, so the apolitical nature of the techno scene is actually an advantage for me."

This is what Korda writes, and to this extent the church leader's teaching sounds sexy and even likable; it appears to be a charming veganism that, if it had been surrounded by more enlightenment nonsense, could have occurred to the cute Dr. Motte. Of course, his teaching contains the error of thought typical of all politically active vegans, namely that it does not regard humans as part of nature, but rather considers them to be something supernatural or anti-natural that can overcome itself in a quasi-divine way.

Chris Korda, however, is neither naive nor a bad propagandist. But that makes him - at second glance - something completely different from a pop star. Because he, whose appearances are so impressively cool, especially for communication purposes, is the clever promoter of his teachings. Unlike other vegans, he is not a backwoods nature worshipper with a pronounced hostility to technology.

Korda thinks the use of technology is completely fine; he writes that any means used to build something can also be used to destroy it. In this case, civilisation. He does not see his performance as art. Pop is a means of transport for him, and his music is banal on the surface because it is about awakening. He uses his vocal samples differently than other electronic rockers; here they are actually intended as messages.

"My music is only effective if it entertains people. Boring propaganda doesn't work. The Unabomber is a good example. His 30,000-word manifesto was well thought out, but had no entertainment qualities. Most people put that aside and turned to the sports section. The activities of the Church of Euthanasia often seem senseless or provocative. This follows from a strategy that has its roots in Dadaism or anti-art movements and is based on the knowledge that paradox is the best remedy against totalitarianism." His defense of the Unabomber is not without reason. Korda repeatedly refers positively to the right-wing radical academic who saw the path to salvation in the warm, anti-urbanist nature of the wood-hut and even committed assassinations to spread his teachings.

Korda explains that the excitement over someone like the Unabomber is bigoted; it seems "surreal in the face of the fact that American B-52s are bombing the population of Yugoslavia back to the Stone Age." He believes that the Unabomber's teachings are correct. But they are not rigorous enough for him. Although he admires militant actions, he does not believe that violence is the right means to achieve his goal of leaving the earth free of people. Because war is a complete failure as a method.

"Historically, wars are completely ineffective forms of population reduction, not only because they are followed by baby booms, but also by industrial reconstruction and economic growth, as in Germany and Japan. Modern wars are fought in cooperation with industrial forces, and could be seen as spasms of technological and economic growth." Korda's anti-capitalism is based solely on the idea that industrial society has set out to destroy nature. He is the advocate of animals. He is less concerned about humans.

Even the Holocaust leaves him relatively indifferent. "War is not the exception but the rule, the true content of industrialism. Production and consumption combine at the highest point of efficiency in a single process of disintegration. What made the Holocaust so shocking was that the camps and railway carriages were so familiar, so ordinary. The same techniques have been applied to animals for a century and are still in use today. In the USA we slaughter more than a billion animals a year, often in factory farms that look very suspiciously like Dachau." The fact that he relativizes the Holocaust with these words does not bother him much.

"I do not ignore the suffering of the Jews. But what matters to me is that there are still Jews, perhaps not so many in Europe, but certainly in the United States. To put it bluntly: as a race, as a culture, the Jews are growing back. The millions of non-human beings that we have exterminated in the last 500 years are not growing back. They cannot grow back because they have disappeared, forever.

Nobody builds monuments to them because the Holocaust of these creatures is not history, it is the present, it is happening now. Where the Nazis failed, industrial society succeeds, exterminating a species every five minutes, day after day, year after year."

For someone like Korda, the Holocaust is no longer a specific event, because it happens everywhere and every day. This means that the Jews are suddenly just one group of victims among many. What's more, Korda only examines political events in the context of their associated impact. He twists events to suit his own purposes. For someone like him, the Holocaust and war therefore only appear ineffective - you can see that there are still Jews on earth. Does that mean that Korda would have welcomed a "successful" Holocaust, one that was "successful" in the USA too? He doesn't dare go that far.

Korda then condemns genocide again, especially that of the Native Americans, with the argument that everyone should end their lives voluntarily. Why he then defends the Unabomber's murders remains a mystery. Korda and the Church of Euthanasia are falling into exactly the same trap that the provocateurs and spontaneous activists were heading for in the early 1980s. By constantly relativizing the Holocaust, it is initially marginalized, but then again conceivable as a viable possibility. War, Holocaust, fascism, all of this degenerates into a question of form.

The COE writes in one of its communications that there is a photo of Korda naked in a crematorium oven at Dachau concentration camp. The photo was originally even supposed to be used as the cover of the upcoming album. Korda, it seems, will use any means necessary to ensure the success of this "special personality". Being an anti-Semite is obviously one of them.

• Oke Göttlich / Jörg Sundermeier

Chris Korda & The Church of Euthanasia: "Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong". Gigolo Records/EFA

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