A statement on the current crisis from the international surrealist movement, issued November 2024.
Your flower will pass through the hands of the storm
Follow the star of her hand,
her masks, her falcons and the red ice of trance.
Laurence Weisberg
Give me the fog that fertilizes the neighborhood of the insatiated,
let him tattoo with his tongue the high cliff of his dissatisfied chest.
Give me the ocean and its murmur of promises,
and his voice depositing in the street a borderline language.
Eugenio Castro
In our quest for liberation from the grim labyrinth in which we are still ensnared, as we were a century ago, surrealists align with those who share our goal of transforming the world and changing life. We condemn the obstacles to this liberation and the lies and excuses that serve this empire of misery.
The world needs more than declarations. Visionary rhetoric won’t stop bombs or resurrect the dead. Convinced as we are, however, that surrealism is a unique and vital liberatory project, we re-assert our principles as a spark of hope and signpost to better paths. Like the starry sky above smog and neon lights, sometimes these paths must be grasped by imagination even as they elude the senses. We maintain that an ever-widening poetic spirit must catch fire everywhere, to solve problems that have defeated and reinforced sober pragmatism; that only a wild fiery eros can burn up the flimsy simulacra of life imposed upon us from every direction, revealing doorways to gardens of delight.
In the spirit of international solidarity, we refuse alignment with imperial blocs and capitalist fronts, whether in defense of the desperate hegemony of Washington and its lackeys, or on behalf of the competing ‘multi-polar’ regimes. We refuse to take sides in apocalyptic wars between national gangs. We therefore take no position toward the imperial slaughter and proxy war in Ukraine other than total defeatism toward all sides, for the dissolution of all belligerent states and the opening of a path to utopia through their ruins. All the double standards, the vapid appeals to democracy, sovereignty, and anti-fascism (with both armies sporting bona fide neo-Nazis in their ranks)- deserve our scorn. We mock the politicians and pundits who tell us to accept the necessity of nuclear war. If we are accused of being dreamers and utopians by those trapped within instrumental reason, we must ask what kind of ‘sense’ their abject realpolitik makes when compared to our desire for total emancipation. Their cowardly and mediocre complicity with domination directs the future towards their particular end of the world, which will never be ours.
Just as we reject these rotten narratives, we also reject ideologies of racial or religious superiority and the accompanying license to brutalize others. Such a mindset is obvious in the IDF’s ongoing massacre of the people of Gaza, at the behest of a state no longer afraid to voice its deep-seated genocidal longings. It is criminal for the world not to assist the Palestinians until the occupation is dismantled. To call for ‘peace’ after more than a year of massacres and pretend to care about Palestinians for political gain or votes is a perfect example of what a previous generation of surrealists called ‘murderous humanitarianism.’
Nor do we have illusions about any regime in the Middle East; they laugh at freedom and crush dissent for the greater glory of the omnipotent market. The two Powers, Israel and Iran, appearing as the worst foes, share similar traits of authoritarian, theocratic nationalism, despite whatever pretense of democracy is used to legitimize their rule. National and religious liberation movements, whose means correspond exactly to their ends suppress the people they claim to represent. It’s no surprise that some close ranks behind their flag out of sheer despair and rage. We insist that a solution can only be found in regional and global revolutionary transformation. Our divergence from dead and deadly ideologies and religions only confirms the necessity of this struggle. The imaginary utopía of today shines in the opaque night of the century where we struggle for a way out. We remember the betrayed promises and grim lessons of history.
Even if contingencies exist as Great Invisibles where everything will be renewed, we cannot ignore the urgency of the ongoing disaster.
In this horror, the principles of the “rules-based international order” are exposed by the dead bodies of children labelled terrorists. In Israel and abroad, proponents of apocalyptic bloodlust grow bolder whether they seek to justify themselves with a theological or a secular rationale. They would remove the memory of internationalist revolutionary organizations such as the Matzpen movement, which denounced Zionist colonialism from the inside by building bridges with Palestinian, Lebanese and Algerian comrades. They would likewise censor any awareness of the Arab Surrealist group Le Desir Libertaire, who fought pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic fanaticism. Such regressive formations simply increase the tragic iniquity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and further the exploitation of Arab societies; they can never be the solution.
In its own hypocritical role, liberalism is a crumbling fossil blending more and more into the surrounding charnel ground, its hollow humanitarian pronouncements reduced to a narcissistic delusion in the smoke of the battlefield. A bullet grazing an oligarch’s ear elicits gasps from mouths that ooze with the blood of Gaza, that pause from gnawing skulls to denounce “political violence”, in the heart of the world’s leading exporter of violence.
For all these reasons, those who seek to corral poetry, freedom and love into the service of this malignant capitalist civilization that rules us with numbers and bullets have mouths full of corpses.
Flowers and support to the resisters, fraternizers, draft-dodgers and those in mourning, to those fighting for their lives and those persecuted for their acts of conscience. A salute to all the rebels everywhere from the radical environmentalists of Soulevements de la Terre against the mega-dams in France, to the workers and students of Kenya or Bangladesh who light the blasphemous flame of freedom and revolt against neoliberalism and tyranny. Their black light in the streets devours and abolishes the inhumane illumination of the Olympic torch of Macron I the Repressor and the sinister fires of fascist pogroms.
We don’t eat that bread! We will follow the star that passes through the hands of the storm, which will fertilize the demolished neighborhood of the insatiated, which will deposit in all the streets the promise of the red ice of trance: a common borderline language.
Signed:
The Chrysopoeia Surrealist Cooperative, Madrid Surrealist Group (Manuel Crespo, Andres Devesa, Vicente Gutierrez Escudero, Javier Galvez, Lurdes Martinez, Noe Ortega, Jesus Garcia Rodriguez, Jose Manuel Rojo), Middle East and North Africa Surrealist Group (MENA),Penelope Rosemont, Magdalena Benavente, Jay Blackwood, Richard Burke, Susan Burke, Doug Campbell, Steven Cline, Neil Coombs, Mohsen ElBelasy, Alice Farley, Brandon Freels, Esther Holbrook, Stuart Inman, Ghadah Kamal, Renay Kerkman, Taya King, Unruh Lee, Ryan McCarthy, David Nadeau, Jaime Alfaro Ngwazi, Flores Nunes Jr, Daniel O’Reilly, Marianna O’Reilly, Gregorio Parades, Pierre Petiot, Matthew Presti, Marco Rivera, Penelope Rosemont, Mark Rosenzweig, Veronica Cabanillas Samaniego, James Sebor, LaDonna Smith, Darren Thomas, Andrew Torch, Beth E. Wilson, Craig S. Wilson, Dada Zilch, Anthony Redmond
