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The narrator tells us that “Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character” (248). It was not the actual ugliness of the Communist world that was repulsive to her but “the mask of beauty” the Communist world was trying to wear, or the “Communist kitsch,” the model of which was the May Day celebration (249). The May Day parade, with all its ceremonies, was not an “agreement” with Communism but with “being”; its motto was not “long live Communism!” but “Long live life!” Kundera comments that “this idi-otic tautology” would attract everyone to the Communist parade even those who were indifferent to the communist theses (249). It’s not a political party Kundera, and Sabina as a character in the novel, are trying to question, but the aesthetic representation of an agreement with being, a being the agreement with which needs the mask of kitsch. An ideal is offered while the reality to which the ideal is opposed is something else. “In masquerading as art,” kitsch’s “fundamental mission,”

is “the creation of a new myth that can mediate between the irrational chaos of reality and the

need for systematizing it. This mythological operation is indispensable for grounding the unify-ing value system so sorely needed in the present” (McBride 6). That is why Broch defines kitsch as “the element of evil in the value system of art” (63).

Outside her country, in America, Sabina experiences a different expression of kitsch. An American senator gives Sabina a ride in his big car with his four children “bouncing up and down in the back”. He stops the car in front of a stadium and the children jump out. The senator

“gazing dreamily” at the “bouncing figures”, while “describing a circle with his arm, a circle that was meant to take in stadium, grass, and children” tells Sabina: “Now that’s what I call happi-ness” (The Unbearable Lightness 250). For her, the senator is similar to a Communist statesman on a reviewing stand in a Prague square who smiles at the “identically smiling citizens in the pa-rade below” (250), feeling happiness and joy. Both the senator and the statesman have images in mind, images evoking feelings. As Kundera says: “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it inde-cent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme” (250). He goes on to say:

The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children run-ning on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch. (251)

One is moved by the image of a collective tear shared by all. Kundera goes on to relate this feature of kitsch to the politicians, calling kitsch “the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements” (251). However, the dictatorial ruling of a single political power as opposed to various political tendencies in a society creates “totalitarian kitsch”. But to-talitarian kitsch does not only refer to “political” parties; kitsch also exists where there is democ-racy. By totalitarian kitsch, Kundera means that “everything that infringes on kitsch must be ban-ished for life” (252). Totalitarian kitsch is against individuality and any “deviation from the col-lective”; it is against any kind of “doubt” or any “irony” (252). Totalitarian kitsch forbids all questions and instead offers answers, because a question is “like a knife” that cuts through the aesthetic surface or the beautiful lie and reveals the truth lying beneath. In other words, totalitar-ian kitsch could mean that all kitsch is in fact totalitartotalitar-ian. Kitsch seeks to take control and to pro-mote indubitable agreement. Kundera says: “[T]here are various kitsches: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Communist, Fascist, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international”

(257). However, it is not different theories, or “rational attitudes” that make these systems differ-ent: “political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch”; what matters is to be always on a “splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness”.

The reflections on the notion of political kitsch are then explicated further: “The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased

productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March” (257). Gilles Fraser points out that the senator’s arm movement is rep-resentative of kitsch’s way to exclude” (131). With excluding, kitsch in fact includes everyone.

“What is so sinister about the American senator’s kitsch is that his own lens (‘describing a circle with his arm’) lays the foundation for this act of exclusion, and, at its most extreme, the logic of this exclusion leads to the ‘final solution’” (Fraser 131). Perhaps what is truly sinister is that kitsch’s authoritarian power does not follow any logic.

Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, refers to “the system of symbolic thought”, an irrational system that “underlies all behavior, individual and collective” (61). He explains that this irra-tional system, “the system of confusions” rules political life as well. Some political movements or some wars bear more importance than some others that are “symbolically mute” (63). For ex-ample, “the gulag will never supplant Nazism as a symbol of absolute evil in the European con-sciousness” or the war in Afghanistan will never gain the importance of the Vietnam war (63).

The passions aroused by symbols correspond to sentiments. They are like metaphors that can be dangerous (The Unbearable Lightness 11). And this system of symbols in which “man is a child wandering lost” (The Art of the Novel 63) is not far from what a kitsch system of thought is based on.