Photograph by Sam Sherratt

’Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form.’ — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

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The word ‘kitsch’ entered the English language from German (kitsch, meaning gaudy trash, from the dialect word kitschen, to smear or coat). It was much used by art critics in the thirties to distinguish avant garde values from sentimental ‘picture postcard’ art of the woodlands-in-autumn or kittens-in-baskets variety. Sunsets over the sea, that kind of thing.

In his great novel of ideas, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Milan Kundera takes the word and expands its horizons to include not just taste in art but world-view or cultural attitude. He defines it as ‘the absolute denial of shit’.

“The fact that until recently the word ‘shit’ appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” (Part 6: The Grand March.)

Every outlook or movement, Kundera goes on, is liable to devolve into a kitsch version of itself: romantic kitsch, patriotic kitsch, religious kitsch, communist kitsch, and so on. In totalitarian kitsch, the ‘shit’ is dissenting thought, and the gulag becomes the septic tank of the system. In bourgeois kitsch, shit consists of sexuality, social unorthodoxy, status-lowering behaviour, dress, language or occupation, certain political ideas, and death.

As well as actual shit, naturally.

As a small child in a middle-class family, I sensed the familial constriction of kitsch. I wondered, for instance, why the grown-ups mowed the lawn. It seemed to me, to paraphrase Kundera, a denial of grass. As soon as I was old enough, I embraced bohemian values. Not only Velvet Underground and The Doors, Nico and Patti Smith, but Chatterton, Keats and Baudelaire, de Quincy and Shelley, Messiaen and Bartok, Salvador Dali and David Gascoigne, all showed me something through the flimsy paper walls of bourgeois kitsch. They hinted at the sublime.

I didn’t discover Kundera until I was in my thirties, and his musings gave me a new way to think about what I’d been trying to define all my life: what it is that has so bothered me, and made me so difficult. It is Kitsch — kitsches of all kinds — that induced this alienation. Suburban kitsch, Anglican kitsch, Christmas kitsch, married-with-children kitsch, Guardian-reading New-Labour kitsch, environmentalist kitsch, globalist kitsch, New Age, positive-thinking kitsch. Human beings produce kitsch as continuously as they produce shit.

Now, even with church and marriage and child-rearing and The Guardian and my international school career all in the past, I feel it more than ever. There are so many things I can’t discuss with members of my family, or most of my old friends.

Certain realities we may never speak of.

And there are new kinds of shit, giving rise to a new kinds of kitsch.

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I wrote the above six years ago.  It was a way of introducing the topic of atmospheric geo-engineering, or stratospheric particle injection — it has many names. The colloquial term is chemtrails. 

I’d been observing the phenomenon for a number of years, and was aware of some of the research that had been done. But I wasn’t writing about the atmospheric phenomenon so much as the social one — the impossibility of getting anyone I knew to discuss something so important; of getting anyone to look up. More than any other topic I’d tackled in my writing — and it’s hard not to talk about something you’re actively researching — this one caused problems with people. It was regarded as the most far-out of all conspiracy theories, absurd on its face, impossible prima facie. You just couldn’t talk about it. It’s as if people sense, subconsciously, the presence of a lethal text, written huge across the sky.

So I confined my thoughts to these pages: here on this big island in the Andaman Sea, I learned to keep the sky to myself. Even with Western friends, visiting me here in Phuket. A beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky — not a real one, anyway. Just smeared chemtrails, blending into the light aerosol haze that’s been whitening our skies for years now. Not enough to spoil the day, just taking the edge off the intense sun, so why even mention it? I didn’t. My friends are younger than me, smart, educated, and creative. But still there are things you can’t mention without spoiling the mood. We can talk about sex and shit, and drugs and shit, and films and books and families and relationships and shit… But mention chemtrails? Forget it. That’s a ‘conspiracy theory’. Kitsch has not gone away. After all these years, I still haven’t found a way through its smothering, mothering embrace.

Kitsch is the determination to control the conversation. Kitsch will decide the rules. Kitsch will determine what is to be discussed.

Or rather what is not. It’s as if anything important is now considered indecent. It’s weird. And weird is the right word. I feel our destiny in these silences: the kitsch that is killing us.

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I called the piece ‘Genocidal Kitsch’. A more accurate word might be democidal, since ‘genocide’ implies the destruction of a particular ethnicity or culture, and this is about everybody. ‘Democide’ means the mass killing of populations by their own governments. In the twentieth century democide accounted for more deaths than war. In the twentieth century you were statistically far more likely to be killed by your own government than anyone else’s.

I’m sure you can understand why I would want to update this piece for the covid era. After all, in my country four years ago, people were allowed, once a week, to stand outside their houses (socially distanced of course), banging pots and pans and clapping for a socialised health system at the very moment it turned into the opposite of itself. A clever trick, to get people to applaud their own extermination. And the absolute definition of kitsch, for all time.

Well, it’s easy for me to see and to say. My mind has long been open to the possibility of something like this being on the way, ever since I read Bill Joy’s seminal 2001 article Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, including its extract from the Unabomber Manifesto and its reflections on the trinity of technologies that would dominate the new century — genetics, robotics and nanotechnology —  in conjunction with the digital architecture under development since the Second World War. 

Joy concludes, “I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”

It’s an easy segue from there to Bill Gates’ insane plan to vaccinate the entire population of the world with a novel technology, never before applied to humans, and with no data on long-term effects. Once we were informed how the vaccines were designed, it appeared quite obvious that the mRNA transfection technique would create auto-immune disease, as Professor Sucharit Bhakdi spelled out in a series of impassioned warnings. Cells infected with the spike protein antigen would be targeted by the host’s T-cells and killer lymphocytes, destroying the organs where the lipid nano-particles had lodged in quantity, whether the heart, liver, reproductive organs or brain. It’s immunology 101, as they say. The dictum that one should never ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to incompetence breaks down completely at this point. No vaccine designer is that stupid. Therefore this isn’t a badly designed vaccine, it’s a well-designed bioweapon.

It is now more than two years since Naomi Wolf, presenting the work of the 3,000-strong team of experts she assembled to go through 450,000 pages of Pfizer documents released under court order, published her article Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce to Genocide. She was impelled to this conclusion by the discovery that Pfizer knew the harm that the product would do to unborn and newborn babies.

We already knew, thanks to the work of these volunteers, that Pfizer and the FDA knew by December 2020 that the MRNA vaccines did not work, and that one side-effect of getting vaccinated was “Covid”. We already knew that Pfizer’s internal trials had caused 42,000 adverse events and more than 1200 deaths — four people had died the same day they were injected.

We already knew that Pfizer and the FDA knew that, contrary to official misinformation, the MRNA, spike protein and lipid nanoparticles did not stay in the deltoid muscle, but dispersed into the bloodstream within 48 hours, and thence to the heart, brain, liver, spleen, testes or ovaries. Now it had emerged that they also knew that the lipid nanoparticles traverse the amniotic membrane and enter the fetal environment — “one of the most sacred spaces on this earth”, writes Wolf.

“[…] Pregnant women were excluded from the internal studies, and thus from the EUA on which basis all pregnant women were assured the vaccine was safe and effective […] nonetheless about 270 women got pregnant during the study. More than 230 of them were lost somehow to history. But of the 36 pregnant women whose outcomes were followed, 28 lost their babies. […] A baby died after nursing from a vaccinated lactating mother, and was found to have had an inflamed liver. Many babies nursing from vaccinated mothers showed agitation, gastrointestinal distress, and failure to thrive (to grow), and were inconsolable. Some vaccinated mothers had suppressed lactation, or could produce no milk at all. […] Four of the lactating vaccinated women in the Pfizer documents reported “blue-green” breast milk. […] On such faulty science were women assured that the vaccines were ‘safe and effective’ for them and their nursing babies.” [My edit.]

She concludes: “It seems that there can indeed be a happenstance genocide. Reproduction itself is targeted, intentionally or not, by the mRNA vaccines. And if you know that reproduction is harmed, and babies and fetuses are harmed, and you know that this is at scale, which everyone at Pfizer and at the FDA who read these documents knew — and if you do not stop — then does that not ultimately become a genocide?”

In recent interviews, Dr Wolf no longer talks about ‘happenstance’; there is no longer any question in her mind: ‘It’s staring us in the face… the virus was a bioweapon, as we now know… the vaccine is a bioweapon… it’s killing people, and it’s sterilising people…” China, she notes, manufactured a billion doses of mRNA vaccines for export only.

The dam broke in late 2021 when the CEO of OneAmerica Insurance reported that his company was seeing a 40% increase all-cause mortality. In August of 2022, the American Society of Actuaries published its annual report, with a supplement in September. The most influential voice analysing and publicising the SOA’s figures was Edward Dowd, a former Blackrock portfolio manager, whose most shocking finding concerned the millennial demographic cohort in America, born between 1980 and 1996, which was now taking the brunt of vaccine damage in the West: there had been a mix-shift from old to young, with the employed population suffering disastrous levels of death and disability.

A spectacular illustration of the scale of the massacre was that between March 2021 and February 2022, 61,000 millennials in excess of the five-year average died in the USA. That’s more young American lives in a single year than the Vietnam war took in ten. In the Vietnam decade 300,000 servicemen and woman were wounded, half of those requiring hospital treatment; in one year (2021-22) an extra three to four million have left the US workforce due to disability.

Decisive evidence emerged in January of this year, when a systems engineer and analyst, John Beaudoin, Sr., testified before the New Hampshire Senate that along with the age spectrum profile, the symptom spectrum profile (i.e. causes of death) changed abruptly on the year boundary 2020-21 from respiratory in 2020 to blood and circulatory in 2021 — cardiac arrest, arrhythmia, embolisms, acute post-hemorrhagic anemia (non-traumatic — i.e. internal bleeding, especially gastro-intestinal hemorrhages and aortic dissections). Any remaining doubt about causation has to be relinquished at this point: it’s the ‘vaccine’ that is doing this.

At the same time, there’s an explosion of soft tissue cancers being reported by concerned doctors, notably Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St Georges Hospital Medical School in London, and the aggressive return of cancers in remission. The slow-kill is in progress, but the deaths will appear to be from many different causes, and the confusion will allow the psychological cover-up to be maintained even as mortality soars.

The mass die-off is is de facto democide, but can we prove intent? The official silence about excess deaths is damning. As far as I know, there is only one government on the planet that is conducting investigations into excess mortality, and that is the Philippines. Only independent pathologists have conducted autopsies and shared the results. The most prominent of these was an erstwhile colleague of Professor Bhakdi, the late Professor Arne Burkhardt, one of the most experienced and respected pathologists in Europe. Burkhardt came out of retirement in 2021 to conduct autopsies on the bodies of people who had died suddenly of unknown causes. None of these deaths had been assumed to be connected to the vaccine, but Burckhardt’s found lesions characteristic of immune enhancement — the killer lymphocytes attacking cells throughout the body which have been tricked into producing the spike protein — in every organ, including the lymph nodes, and especially the endothelium (the lining of blood vessels and organs), in all but one of the seventeen bodies he dissected. This exactly what Bhakdi had predicted; that the auto-immune processes would destroy the bodies of the injected from the inside out. There is nothing ‘mysterious’ about these sudden deaths, except in the citadels of kitsch. The “gruesome quiet” of the authorities is evidence of intent; the cover-up proves the crime.

Dr Mike Yeadon, the former Pfizer VP and CSO (Respiratory), an expert in rational drug development, long since concluded that the ‘vaccine’ is a bioweapon designed to kill and injure: “The present day totalitarians,” he wrote on his Telegram page, “can & I believe will exterminate the great mass of humanity through delayed-action lethal injection.”

Yeadon, by the way, is not a man much given to hyperbole.

We should remember that Professor Denis Rancourt‘s estimate of 17 million deaths directly caused by the vaccine to date is a bare minimum, since it includes only those deaths temporally associated with the vaccine and booster roll-outs. The toll could be ten times that, or twenty times, who knows?

They know. The politicians got exemptions, and set up extra mortuary capacity for the plebs. Prime Ministers and heads of state were shown on television receiving shots of saline or participating in injection mime-shows. Some ‘health leaders’, like Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organisation, and Alfred Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, frankly admitted they didn’t take the shot. Both claimed that they would prefer to let someone else have the benefit of their dose.

I’m sure they would.

There’s no question. The ‘Great Cull’ is underway.

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“We are so far above the population and the consumption levels which can be supported by this planet, that I know that one way or another it’s going to come back down, so I don’t hope to avoid that. I hope that it can occur in a… a civil way, and I mean civil in a special way: peaceful. Peace doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy, but it means that conflict isn’t solved through violence, through force, but rather in other ways, so that’s what I hope for. The planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion, depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption he want to have … we want to have freedom and we want to have a high standard of living, so we’re going to have a billion people. And we’re now at seven, and we have to get back down. I hope that this can be slow, relatively slow, and that it can be done in a way that is relatively equal, you know, so that people share the experience, and we don’t have a few rich forcing everybody else to deal with it. These are my hopes, and they’re pretty pessimistic hopes, but that’s what lies ahead.”

The quotation above is from an interview with Professor Dennis Meadows, an American academic and one of the lead authors of the Club of Rome’s ‘Limits to Growth’ report in 1972. I’m guessing the interview is from sometime around 2010, based on the population figure to which he refers. When he speaks of human numbers ‘coming back down’, of the depopulation ‘occurring’, he is using equivocal language to suggest a natural process, a Malthusian correction that happens all by itself without intervention. He can’t entirely sustain the pretence, however, and clearly knows that these are political decisions, that population will be stabilised at an agreed level: the statement ‘We’re going to have a billion people’ clearly suggests an existing consensus.

Meadows is still with us, aged 82 now. He must be pretty happy with the way things are going. He is getting his wish: a ‘peaceful’ depopulation, a ‘civil’ genocide, everyone politely pretending that it’s not happening, preserving a democidal decorum. Only my kind keep spoiling it with our uncouth grasp of facts and our primitive faith in objective truth.

That’s certainly how it’s going with my remaining family back in the UK.

I tried to warn them, as it was my duty to do, but it didn’t go well, leading only to farcical tantrums and billowing emotional smokescreens, through which I could hardly insert a word of sense. It was shocking, actually, to see how ludicrously incompetent my blood relatives were when it came to thinking logically, never mind scientifically. Old or young, it was like trying to reason with hysterical children. Relationships now are either on hold (I’ve been suspended by my daughter), or very brittle. Civil, that’s all. Meadows would be proud.

I feel so sorry for them; they seem so vulnerable, so fragile, now, as if the truth would shatter them to pieces. Of course they don’t want to know, not now: it’s too late. Even if I could get through to them, it would be a lethal text such that they couldn’t possibly absorb; the psychological impact would be devastating. How would they come to terms not just with the system’s failure to protect them, but their own failure to protect their children? Both my brother and my sister have young sons in higher education. Both are athletes, one a footballer, one a climber. My daughter too is an enthusiastic runner. There has been a rash of young athletes collapsing and in many cases dying — over a hundred FIFA-registered soccer players died suddenly during the first year of the vaccination program. Meanwhile mainstream media outlets carry laughable stories in which ‘scientists’ suggest the spate of heart attacks among the general population, including teenagers and children, is being caused by climate change, or the clocks going forward, or being too happy. That’s the kind of nonsense they spout in the land of kitsch, and no one even laughs.

It’s the insane disjunction that is so frustrating, the impossibility of communicating. Ghosting was initially standard; my persistence merely elicited silence from my sister and pompous, disapproving diatribes from my brother, while my daughter was forced to get quite vicious with me to preserve her privacy on the vaccination question. She ran the gamut to defend that fatal space; anything, to avoid the lethal text. I knew it would be difficult, but it was even crazier than I expected; the hostile naivety; the psychologising; everything subsumed into the sanctioned stereotypes, just as they have been taught over the years by the entrainment media; the groupthink, the lack of critical intellect, the inability to name premises, or validate logic; the appeals, exclusively, to emotion and belief. And authority, of course.

Is ignorance a choice? Well, when you have a brother or a father trying to tell you something of vital importance, begging to be used as a resource, and you refuse even to listen, never mind to engage critically, to ask questions, to discuss, then yes, it’s a choice — they had the chance to know, and they declined it. In fact the choice of ignorance was explicitly acknowledged. My brother told me that he and his son were helping out at vaccination centres, while my sister, the general manager of a rural medical practice, was on the ‘front lines’ of the battle against the virus; that was their reality now, he told me, and they were simply not interested in my ‘alternative reality’.

My daughter, too: she didn’t want to believe that the world is a terrible place.

And there it is: the absolute denial of shit.

I do understand how frightening it is, of course, and I understand how long and traumatic a process it can be to undergo such a paradigm-shift, since I’ve been through it myself. Watching a formerly middle-of-the-road, thoroughly ‘normie’ type like Yeadon, or Bhakdi even, undergo such a brutal, forced induction to my world over the space of a couple of years has been interesting. Both have come through it with their dignity, integrity and humanity only enhanced.

But to live through this time and have nothing to say, to fail to respond in any way, to pretend none of it is happening? White feathers all round, I’m afraid.

But I must be nice and not mention it. Global genocide has its own etiquette, you see. It’s the first time I’ve been through one, so I didn’t know. I should apologise for my uncouthness in failing to observe the protocols. How scandalous to try to save people’s lives, how arrogant of me to think I might have something important to pass on. I must write a nice newsy letter which doesn’t even mention the pandemic, the vaccine, the aftermath, anything — just as if none of it had ever happened. This behaviour will meet with approval and be reciprocated, and so we will continue, uneasily, pretending we can’t hear the crunching of eggshells like tiny skulls beneath our feet.

I pray for understanding to dawn. What else I can do? The truth is coming out, slowly, slowly, and I pray that they will be able to hear it in time to make a difference. I am not confident, though. I suspect that if I or any of my fellow spirits harbour secret hopes that our normie families, bless their white little hearts, will ever allow themselves to be schooled by reality to the point of realising that we were right all along about this, forget it. You’re never going to get that apology, or those thanks for trying to alert them, or that new and stronger bond as you walk arm-in-arm into the valley of the shadow of death.

Kitsch is the death of imagination, the death of courage and of conscience, the death-in-life I’ve seen and always feared more than anything else. It’s like that Roman Catholic priest* said, livestreaming urgently as he walked home through the deserted streets of Rome after celebrating midnight mass with zero congregants present, nearly four years ago it must be now, signing off with ‘just don’t pretend it’s not happening.’ And that, I believe, is essential spiritual advice.

The authorities will make it as easy as possible to do so, reinforcing the cognitive and psychological fences between the ‘normisphere’ and the reality-based community, fences which threaten to become real in the form of concentration camp — sorry, quarantine facility — barbed wire. In the more extreme outposts of the Covidian empire, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, that totalitarian nightmare came frighteningly close to reality in 2021, and it hasn’t gone away. Totalitarianism comes from below as well as above, and the normies will collaborate, are collaborating, in the achievement of a suffocating silence. The perennial instinct of kitsch underwrites the new authoritarianism to ensure a disaster of millennial proportions does not occasion any awkward conversations over the dinner table, as families purge themselves of their extremists and conspiracy theorists.

The masks, it’s clear, were only ever of ritual significance; our very own Rite to Remain Silent. 

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* Br. Alexis Bugnolo https://www.fromrome.info/

UPDATED June 2024