Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

—André Breton, Nadja (1928)

On 18 October 2023, eleven days into Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza, I allowed myself to feel something adjacent to hope. I was in Washington, D.C. for what was billed as “the largest ever Jewish protest in solidarity with Palestinians” – looking out over the National Mall at thousands of faces gathered under a banner reading “Jews Say Ceasefire Now”.

Thirty-five years earlier, I had attended my first protest against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – a silent vigil in Jerusalem organised by the feminist peace group Women in Black during the first intifada. We were squeezed onto a traffic island at a busy intersection, while drivers sped past us, some furious, most oblivious.

For decades, that was pretty much how it felt inside the Jewish wing of the movement for Palestinian liberation. We were the picture of marginality. But on that October day in Washington, we suddenly felt like a mass movement. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), one of the main conveners of the protest, was seeing its membership explode, with chapters in dozens of cities and campuses. That morning it had purchased a full-page ad in The New York Times demanding a ceasefire.

Claiming our Jewishness felt urgent. Since the 7 October attacks, Israeli officials had loudly proclaimed their intention to respond with genocidal fury. Every person in Gaza would be treated as guilty, as subhuman, and the strip would be strangled, starved and bombed to rubble. The officials pledged to fight not only to defend Israel, but also to protect Jews everywhere from what they claimed was an imminent threat of a second Holocaust. “Never Again is Now”, they declared, again and again.

The protest on Capitol Hill was the largest Jewish effort thus far to disrupt that story – to demonstrate that there has always been a very different interpretation of “never again”. At the podium, speakers invoked relatives who had perished in the Holocaust, and shared the sense of duty that legacy instilled in them to prevent future genocides, even when fellow Jews threatened to become perpetrators. On signs and in chants, a slogan recurred: “Never Again. To Anyone.”

After the rally, hundreds of demonstrators, wearing black-and-white T-shirts emblazoned with “NOT IN OUR NAME” in block letters, walked peacefully into the domed rotunda of Cannon House on Capitol Hill, locked arms, and sat down. Among them were rabbis draped in prayer shawls; some sounded the shofar. At the time, I was shuttling between meetings with congresspeople, working with JVP’s political action arm to drum up support for a new resolution, introduced by congresswomen Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, which called for an immediate ceasefire. In those often tense and emotional meetings, we could hear the voices of Jewish demonstrators chanting “Let Gaza live” through the walls as they were dragged off by police.

More than two years have passed since then, and the genocide we vowed to stop has indeed taken place, is taking place still. And these atrocities are still being justified by invoking the memory of the Nazi genocide. As late as July 2025, Aimchai Eliyahu, a senior politician in Israel’s Ministry of Heritage, cooly explained to a radio interviewer that it was all going according to plan: Israel’s strategy of deliberate starvation, alongside the daily demolitions, meant that “the government is rushing to erase Gaza”. His rationale? Palestine has “educated its people on the ideas of Mein Kampf”. A Nazi strategy, in other words, in the name of fighting Nazism.

In the first months of the new Trump Administration, punishing supposedly virulent antisemitism on the left was the go-to justification for authoritarian crackdowns. It provided the cover story for Donald Trump’s attacks on universities and for kidnapping international students off the streets – even for invoking an obscure provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that was first used to target Jewish immigrants believed to be Soviet spies. Similar tactics have been used in Italy, Germany, France and the UK to criminalise antigenocide protestors as terrorist sympathisers, while openly racist far-right parties claim to stand with Israel against antisemitism.

Fascism is roaring back in the twenty-first century and, in a sickening twist, it is rhetorically claiming that mass censorship, high-tech surveillance and extra-judicial detention are necessary to protect the victims of twentieth-century fascism. Until, of course, even that flimsy façade is dropped in favour of a purer white nationalism with no need for Jewish cover. That evolution is already well underway, with unreconstructed antisemites on the far right – such as Nick Fuentes, helpfully amplified by Tucker Carlson – seizing upon widespread revulsion at Israel’s carnage, and the suppression of voices opposing it, to open the floodgates of Jew hatred, updating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Jeffrey Epstein era.

How did we arrive at this contorted place? What were all those museums and lesson plans and documentaries about the Holocaust for, if not to prevent a moment such as this? And what about all those books with checklists on how to spot your country sliding into fascism? Why did so many of the people who read them – and even some of the people who wrote them – falter when a genocide was unfolding on their screens, a genocide that has blown a hole in the moral universe and decimated the shaky edifice of international humanitarian law, making any further depravity now feel entirely possible?

Some of the reasons may lie in the history lessons themselves. Western commentators generally conceive of fascism as a rupture in the time-space continuum that nearly swallowed the heart of Europe in the interwar period. They understand the Holocaust as both a horror so immense it defies comparison with any other, and yet also a maw that could open again anytime. Fascism, in this telling, is something that repeats on a loop, in almost identical ways, with the victims and perpetrators playing fixed roles, for all eternity.

But those who were on the other end of Europe’s colonialism saw, early on, that fascism had a shapeshifting quality. In 1938, Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, travelled to Europe and witnessed the movement’s rise for himself. Speaking to students at Allahabad University on his return, he observed that “Fascism is only employing in Europe the methods employed by imperialism in other continents. Fascism is a mirror to the past, and to a certain extent the present, of imperialism.” In the years that followed, politicians and intellectuals in the Global South, as well in Black liberation movements in the US, would draw similar parallels. Most famously, the Martinican author Aimé Césaire described Nazism as a “boomerang” of the supremacist ideologies and exterminatory methods deployed in the colonies, now returning to the metropole.

Because there had never been a meaningful reckoning for colonial atrocities, when pith helmets were replaced with Waffen-SS caps, the continuities between imperialism and domestic fascism were largely missed by Europeans. This failure of recognition was the central claim of Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book, Exterminate All the Brutes: “Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested,” he wrote. And yet, “when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognised it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.”

To which we now must add: when what was done in the heart of Europe was repeated in the hospitals, schools, shelters and press tents of Gaza, the supposedly liberal and humanist institutions of North America and Europe once again failed to recognise it, and once again refused to admit what everyone knew. Why? Partly because fascism had slipped into yet another disguise: now it was wearing the cloak of eternal victimhood, even donning yellow stars at the United Nations – stars printed with the words “Never again”.

The history lessons and fascism checklists could prepare us to spot today’s attacks on the courts, press and opposition forces, as well the normalisation of sadism. But they didn’t prepare us for this. Nothing prepared us for a nation perpetrating a genocide, while claiming to be protecting themselves from genocide, all in the name of learning from a previous century’s genocide.

As I have tried to make sense of these derangements, I have often taken refuge in the work of the Jewish-German writer Walter Benjamin, particularly his On the Concept of History, also referred to as Theses on the Philosophy of History. One of its key insights is his description of history not as “a chain of events” but rather as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”. Benjamin wrote the essay in 1940, shortly before trying to escape from Vichy France, where he was at risk of being handed over to the Gestapo. According to Benjamin, the wreckage of history forms a “pile of debris” that “grows skyward”. Later that year, the fascists caught up with him and he took his own life in a small town in Catalonia.

The idea of history as “wreckage upon wreckage” (rather than that ever-repeating loop) goes a long way towards explaining how we could have arrived at what Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly has termed “the age of catastrophe”, with one genocide used to justify another, and the intersections of climate breakdown and surging neo-fascist movements promising much more in store.

As Benjamin knew, wreckage is not an inert substance. It has a life force, it changes, its elements interacting with each other to create volatile new compounds and toxic chain reactions. No one is protected from the weight of history’s accumulation – not even the political forces we might expect to be rousing people to fight fascism. Today’s left, radicalised by genocide and ecocide, has no difficulty articulating disillusionment with Western humanism and the liberal international order, but we have not coalesced around a shared political alternative, another way of living with one another that is genuinely non-fascist.

How could we be otherwise? The revolutionary movements that came before us made great strides, and yet they were defeated before overthrowing the death-dealing systems they opposed. Our world is shaped by those defeats, including the shape of our isolated and monetized selves, and of our fragmented social groupings.

We’re beginning to glimpse what fascism looks like amid the wreckage of history, with all its ironies and absurdities. But an urgent question remains unanswered: what, in that same wreckage, might antifascism look like? We cannot look to the past for easy answers, since the past has changed us in such fundamental ways. But we can look for clues – including to an antifascist movement of artists and philosophers in which Benjamin himself reserved a special kind of hope.

Before fascism cut his life short, Benjamin developed what his friend Gershom Scholem described as a “burning interest” in Surrealism. In a 1929 essay, he praised the movement for possessing “a radical concept of freedom”, a vision he believed was otherwise absent from European politics, even on the Marxist left, which never lacked for doctrines promising utopia after the revolution. Surrealism had been written off by some more austere leftists as overly decadent, frivolous in its self-indulgence. Benjamin had his own frustrations with the movement, certainly. But unlike “the bourgeois parties” he loathed, who skipped over the wreckage of the past and the present in favour of a vision of the future that was merely “a bad poem on springtime”, the Surrealists were willing to look into the abyss of so-called civilisation, admit to “pessimism all along the line”, and nonetheless wrench from that darkness a poetics of revolutionary change.

That alchemy was on full display in the autumn of 2024, when the Pompidou Centre in Paris staged Surréalisme, an exhibition timed to mark the 100-year-anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. Spanning five decades and four continents, it included hundreds of paintings, photographs, poems, sculptures, films, posters and pamphlets by the movement’s heaviest hitters – Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Ithell Colquhoun, Giorgio de Chirico, Joyce Mansour, Leonora Carrington…

In Paris to launch the French edition of Doppelganger, my Surrealism-inspired book exploring pandemic vertigo, digital doubles and political mirror worlds, I went to see the show. There I found myself confronted with the foundational works of what is surely the most sustained – and deranged – experiment of combining revolutionary art and politics.

At the entrance, visitors first step through the open jaws of a giant, kitschy monster, a recreation of the original façade of Cabaret de l’Enfer, a long-shuttered Surrealist haunt located downstairs from Breton’s studio in Montmartre. In the cabaret, the artists partied; upstairs, Breton, along with other fixtures like Robert Desnos and Paul Éluard, hosted rituals and games including “sleep sessions”: group naps that attempted to capture the hallucinatory, liminal space between dreaming and waking.

As I stepped through the monster’s mouth, and back exactly a century in time, I knew the experience would be unique. I had no idea, however, that the ghosts of the past were about to extend a lifeline. In the quiet of the ogre’s innards, I could finally feel the weight of the present, in all its compounding wreckage.

The exhibition was structured like a labyrinth, a shape that enchanted the Surrealists. It struck me as a spiral, opening outward in curves from the original pages of Breton’s manifesto, on loan from the National Library of France, which were encased in a glass drum at the centre. Like the chambers of a nautilus shell, the displays were divided into 14 sections, each one devoted to a different Surrealist passion, among them “Trajectory of the Dream”, “Alice [in Wonderland]”, “Political Monsters”, “Hymns to the Night”, “The Kingdom of the Mothers”, “Forests” and “The Tears of Eros”, all culminating with an exploration of the galaxy in “Cosmos”.

Moving through the first few chambers, I saw images of dismembered human forms, melted flesh, poisoned nightmares, visual and sonic non-sequiturs and mythic beasts. The symmetries between our present-day depravities and the ones the Surrealists captured suddenly felt uncanny, to the point of nausea. Time seemed to collapse in on itself.

To proclaim something surreal in 2025 is to say almost nothing at all. Catchy pop tunes generated by AI are surreal. A heat wave in the Arctic is surreal. A reality show star who becomes president of the United States – twice – is surreal. Generally, what is meant by the term is ‘unreal’: the replacement of organic life with artifice, which is the contemporary condition.

Yet, at its inception, Surrealism reached for the precise opposite: it was a fervent and collective quest for the very essence of life, the more organic the better. As Breton put it, he and his comrades were on a mission to probe existence to find “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak”. This often meant drawing attention to the various forms of artifice that passed themselves off as realism, whether placid landscapes or happy families.

Surrealism’s protagonists flatly rejected the idea that theirs was primarily an aesthetic movement (melted clocks, decontextualised bowler hats, collaged people). Nor did they accept that Surrealism could be reduced to its techniques, whether automatic writing or the experiments in collective sketching known as “exquisite corpse”.

Surrealists used those techniques, certainly, just as they experimented with frottage and collage, and made uncanny juxtapositions: Man Ray’s sewing machine and umbrella, or Dora Maar’s elegant human hand reaching out from a seashell. But the movement’s techniques formed part of a wider imaginative project, one that stood firmly against war, colonialism, class domination and – once women demanded their places as more than muses – patriarchy. Its revolt against a corrupted art world was part of a larger revolt against a continent that believed itself the standard-bearer of “progress” and “civilisation” – then pummeled cities to rubble and turned young men into mass murderers.

In 1924, at the movement’s dawn, this rubble and these murders were neither hyperbolic nor metaphorical. The First World War had just ended, and several leading Surrealists had served in the trenches, where they witnessed rockets and grenades tear through human flesh, saw mustard gas boil the skin of the living, failed to save friends and very nearly died themselves.

The “Great War” distinguished itself by the many ways it combined ancient blood lust with modern science and technology. Many injuries that would previously have been fatal were now survivable – but at tremendous cost to the living. Doctors amputated limbs by the tens of thousands. So many soldiers returned home with disfiguring facial injuries, including missing eyes and noses, that the French created a new term for them: the gueules cassées, or broken faces.

These mutilations shaped the consciousness of many of Surrealism’s young founders. The German artist Max Ernst – whose monstrous The Angel of Hearth and Home appeared on the catalogue cover and the banners for the Pompidou exhibition – was among them. “We young people had come back from the war in a state of stupefaction, and our rage had to find expression somehow or other,” he wrote. “This it did quite naturally through attacks on the foundations of the civilisation responsible for the war. Attacks on speech, syntax, logic, literature, painting and so on.” In other words, Surrealism, like its precursor Dadaism, was a weapon lobbed back at the civilisation that had very nearly killed this generation of artists, or at least shown its willingness to do so. In his autobiography, Ernst described the four years he served as a First World War gunner as a psychic death, writing: “On the first of August 1914 M E died.”

André Masson, a pioneer of automatic drawing, barely survived the trenches. As a young soldier in the French army, he was left on the battlefield with a serious chest injury. In 1917, looking up at the night sky over the Chemin des Dames, awaiting his end, he said the rockets above appeared as a “celebration performed for one about to die”. The stretcher-bearers eventually arrived, but Masson was left with a mysterious condition that soldiers had started referring to as “shellshock”.

Victims of shellshock displayed a range of physical symptoms, including loss of sight and hearing, alongside hallucinations and violent nightmares. Yet outwardly they appeared unharmed. Gradually, doctors came to understand that their ailments were related to repressed memories of battlefield trauma. One of the medics who treated the shellshocked, first in Nantes then in Paris, was a young doctor in training named André Breton. In crowded psychiatric wards, he experimented with treatments such as tracking dreams and practising free association, which he hoped would help combatants integrate the memories that were tormenting them.

Breton gave up on medicine after the war, but he soon adapted these therapeutic techniques to artistic ends. Exercises like sleep sessions, as well as automatic writing and drawing, were intended to circumvent the guarded rational mind and access deeper and purer sources of truth. By Breton’s account, his experiences treating shellshocked soldiers were “at the heart of Surrealism”. The sick patient was no longer an individual soldier, but the entire society that licensed slaughter.

I have seen plenty of modern art from the interwar period, and I was aware that it often depicted the horrors of militarism (we all know Guernica). But I suppose I had accepted the bloodless explanation I received in university survey courses: that the deconstructed bodies and disordered facial features, so prevalent in Cubism and then in Surrealism, merely reflected aesthetic fads – a sudden and synchronous compulsion to break down the building blocks of anatomy. That day at the Pompidou, looking at piece after piece that turned human and bestial bodies inside out – the flayed minotaur in Masson’s Le Labyrinthe (1938), the puddles of organic matter in Gérard Vulliamy’s Le Cheval de Troie (1936-37) and in Matta’s Xpace and the Ego (1945) – I was struck by a realisation that was wholly new to me. A great many of these artists were clearly painting, drawing and sculpting iterations of what they actually saw during the wars that engulfed the continent – saw on the battlefields, in the hospitals and asylums, and in their tormented dreams.

Corporeal mutilation had altered their relationship with the world, which in turn demanded rethinking the very concept of art. Surrealism isn’t representational – unlike naturalism, it doesn’t purport to faithfully reproduce the world. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, because evisceration was as real and material for many of these young artists as their evident desire to burn it all down.

I wondered what had changed my eyes, to help me to see what I had missed for so long. Some of it was the thoughtful curation of Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, who went to great lengths to place the Surrealists back within their historical context. But if I’m honest, it was mostly Gaza. How could it be otherwise? In the year prior to my visit, I had, like countless others around the world, been part of an experiment in the mass (mediated) witnessing of bodily desecration, the implications of which we have barely begun to comprehend.

Walking through the Pompidou, I thought of a viral video of a young girl in Gaza negotiating with her cat, imploring the creature not to eat her when she dies. I thought of another video, blocked by Meta almost as soon as it appeared, of two teenage boys holding up human skulls they found when they returned, after months, to their homes in northern Gaza. I thought of the Canadian eye surgeon, Dr. Yasser Khan, describing the tiny faces, torn apart by shrapnel, on which he had operated at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Khan shared that he had made a promise to a Palestinian toddler that he would one day return to Gaza with a state-of-the-art prosthetic eye for him, so that this modern-day gueule cassée can “be the handsome boy that he is”. I thought of all the ways that Israel was applying precise, “intelligent” tech to the task of mass slaughter.

Most of all, I thought about an essay by the Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, in which she discusses the extraordinary attempts by Palestinians to gather up the pieces of their murdered loved ones and bury them with some measure of dignity. Shalhoub-Kevorkian used the Arabic word ashlaa’ to refer to “scattered body parts and dismembered flesh and bones”, and explained that: “Focusing on the Gazan insistence on speaking about ashlaa’ helps us apprehend how the violent dismemberment of bodies testifies to colonised life and love as they bear witness to state terror.”

As I moved through the exhibition’s chambers, and more artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and a racially segregated US joined the visual chorus, it became clear that this willingness to look at the monstrous was also why Surrealism spread so easily to parts of the world ravaged by state and imperial violence. In Rumblings of the Earth (1950), the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam took inspiration from Picasso’s Guernica to capture the suffering Spain inflicted on its colonies, long before that horror returned home during the Spanish Civil War. Crowded with human and non-human body parts sharpened into blades, hatchets and amulets, the painting is described by curator Zach Ngin as a “a visual representation of Aimé Césaire’s ‘terrific boomerang effect’”. He observes: “The victim in Guernica, the horse, is replaced in Rumblings by what Lam described as a ‘diabolical bird’ that slings knives and arrows. The perplexed victim of fascism is revealed to be a perpetrator as well.”

Fascism, in other words, as a literal shapeshifter: bird to horse, perpetrator to victim.

Surrealists rejected their own society’s institutions and values, but theirs was not a nihilistic worldview. On the contrary, many of them were veterans of Dadaism who broke with that earlier movement precisely because it offered little more than rage and un-making. Surrealism, in contrast, was profoundly romantic. For every severed limb, there was a torso replaced with a tree trunk or seashell. For every monster, a fertile mother, or a beguiling human figure with feathers or tangled leaves for hair.

If the early Surrealists were determined to look evil in the eye, they also doggedly searched for its antidotes – for love, meaning and freedom. Their quest took them both inward, to the depths of their own psyches, into the realm of dreams, hallucinations and childhood innocence; and outward, to the mystery of forests, of oceans, of constellations. They were devoted to enchantment, to rapture and marvel, to the “convulsive” beauty that Breton wrote of in Nadja. Most consistently, they turned towards one another, throwing themselves with abandon into the bonds of friendship – notwithstanding their legendary artistic fractures, ideological splinters, sexual betrayals and noisy excommunications. As Breton put it in an address to the 1935 International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris: “‘Transform the world,’ Marx said; ‘Change life,’ Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.”

They attempted to merge with the natural world – anything that could provide an escape from the machinery of death that disguised itself as progress. In 1937, writing in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, Benjamin Péret expressed a desire for a nature that “devours progress and surpasses it”, while Antonin Artaud called for a “return to nature, i.e., to rediscover life.”

This yearning for a prelapsarian world drew the European Surrealists to non-European cultures and cosmologies that their own governments had violently suppressed, from the Congo to Vietnam. In 1931, when Paris hosted a huge colonial fair, where “primitive” cultures were on zoo-like display, the Surrealists joined a call for a boycott (a framed copy of the pamphlet Ne visitez pas L’Exposition Coloniale was displayed at the Pompidou). They also helped stage a counter-exhibition, La Verité sur les Colonies, which ironically mimicked the form of the official exhibition, but also showcased artworks and music from Africa, North America and Oceania made by people who they believed embodied a “turn against capitalism”.

Some of this got very messy. La Verité sur les Colonies suffered from its own forms of fetishism: many artists went uncredited, and several of the pieces of Indigenous art that were put on display had almost certainly been stolen.

This was a recurring pattern. Breton and other Surrealists had a passionate interest in Indigenous masks, with several of the most prized originating from Alaska and British Columbia, where I live. They snapped them up in curiosity shops during their travels, and would try them on for each other, convinced that in their carved wood and feathers they had located portals to other dimensions, the purest wellspring of Surrealism.

We now know that the masks from British Columbia were in those shops because of an official state policy of exterminating Indigenous culture. Police raided potlatch ceremonies, where the masks were worn, arrested and jailed participants for the crimes of singing and dancing, seized their sacred objects and then sold them through a chain of collectors. Eventually they made their way to retailers, which is where wonder-hungry surrealists found them.

The recent documentary So Surreal: Behind the Masks (2024) tells the story of how First Nations communities in British Columbia and Alaska have tried to trace the whereabouts of their treasures and bring them home. To their credit, when Breton’s family learned, decades after his death, that they had a mask that was particularly meaningful to Kwakwaka’wakw peoples, they quickly repatriated it and made a contribution for its continued care. Other estates have been less forthcoming.

Two years before Breton published the first Surrealism manifesto, Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy. Just as the Surrealists were finding their voice, European fascists were finding theirs. The fascists also recruited from the veterans of the First World War, and they too were responding to the mass maimings and depravities of militarism and capitalism.

But where the Surrealists made irreverent and untameable art, the fascists sought a world of perfect symmetry and parallel lines. While the Surrealists embraced the frailties and mysteries of the human body, the fascists waged war on “deviance”, enforced brutal discipline within their ranks, and worshiped an idealised, “perfect” human form born from “pure” bloodlines. As part of this nostalgic fantasy, they railed against modern art and demanded a return to the sedating naturalism that promised the impossible: the ability to unsee and unfeel all the shame and horror that the First World War and the Great Depression had unveiled. Fascism was, in every way, Surrealism’s political and aesthetic doppelganger, its evil twin.

As huge swaths of Europe fell to fascism, the Surrealists attempted to capture both the menace and the ridiculousness of their rivals. The results were on display at the Pompidou, in the chamber devoted to “Political Monsters”: Victor Brauner’s 1934 portrait of Hitler as a gashed, bolted-together Frankenstein; Marcel Jean’s 1936 sculpture of a seemingly charred head with metal zippers in place of eyes; Erwin Blumenfeld’s 1937 caped cow-man he called The Dictator; Magritte’s 1939 bird of prey in a suit, with its evergreen title: The Present.

The showstopper was Ernst’s 1937 The Angel of Hearth and Home, a monster so vibrant and beautiful it takes a moment to realise that its flailing, stomping limbs form the shape of a swastika. Ernst had been inspired to create this creature during the early days of the Spanish Civil War, when the Popular Front still had a chance. Once Hitler and Mussolini joined the war, the cause was lost, and Ernst gave the painting a new title, The Triumph of Surrealism – irony of the most acrid sort.

When the Nazis declared Surrealism “degenerate art”, the dreamy, fractious radicals didn’t stand a chance. Dalí, always more provocateur than revolutionary, seemed to side with Hitler and Franco, leading to his expulsion from the movement. Ernst was interned in France, then imprisoned by the Gestapo, before finally escaping to the US. Wifredo Lam was driven first from Spain under Franco, then from Vichy France, only to land in Martinique, where he was imprisoned by colonial French authorities, all before he was able to return to Cuba. Breton fled France for New York, as did many other Surrealists including Masson and Yves Tanguy (though some stayed, including Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos, and joined the Resistance). Others landed in Mexico, including Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna.

In exile, the work continued. While in Mexico, Breton collaborated with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky to write the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art”. In the face of both fascist and Stalinist mass censorship, it called for “The independence of art – for the revolution” as well as “The revolution – for the complete liberation of art!”

I was in Paris just a few days after Trump’s reelection. It would be months before the US military would turn the Caribbean sea into a free-fire zone; before masked immigration agents would raid residential buildings in Chicago in the dead of night; before anyone started selling merch for a concentration camp in Florida; before museums and archives in Washington, D.C. came under investigation for “improper ideology”. Yet as I moved through the Pompidou exhibition’s spiral structure, I could already feel history’s whirling pull. Now, as then, a generation is caught in the twin terrors of mass dismembering and surging fascism. Now, as then, a generation is haunted by corporeal horror and political defeats.

Still, it was the differences that struck me most. For the Surrealists, the slide from military horror to full fascism took a couple decades, and even longer for the imperial boomerang to return. Now there are no delays, everything is synchronous. And we have changed, too.

In the 1920s, when the Surrealists began their sleep sessions above the Cabaret de l’Enfer, psychoanalysis was a relatively young field, the subconscious still a wilderness. Breton and his crew dove into the recesses of their own minds like giddy explorers, convinced they were unlocking the secrets of the universe. We, in contrast, are heavy with psychiatric diagnoses and self-knowledge, while paradoxically so moulded and trained by Silicon Valley’s behaviourism, and so bombarded by bots and slop, that we are unsure if our thoughts are even our own, and muddled about who and what is real.

One of the most dramatic differences between their time and ours is the relationship these writers and artists had with the non-human world – their capacity to imagine forests and oceans and stars as beyond the reach of capitalism’s annihilatory powers. Amid the rubble of two world wars, they found constancy and solace in the knowledge that there was a wilderness out there, untouched and untainted.

Does any of that innocence remain today? Here in coastal British Columbia, we revere the great cedars, with their wispy red bark, and their craggy neighbours, the towering Douglas firs; the true giants that have escaped the clearcuts are centuries older than Canada. But the forests are also a source of continual worry: no stand is safe from ever-more ferocious wildfires that choke our skies with smoke each summer. Much of the ocean depths are still a scientific mystery, but we do know that the bellies of seabirds are sick with our plastics, and that the flesh of sea mammals is toxic with our heavy metals, which bioaccumulate as they move up the food chain. When the Surrealists dreamt of merging with beasts and trees, this mass interspecies poisoning is not what they had in mind.

The exhibition’s final chamber, “Cosmos”, explored the ways that outer space appeared in the works of Joan Miró, Alice Rahon and Maurice Baskine. Though I tried to resist, my mind turned to Elon Musk’s fast-multiplying satellites, crawling through the constellations like space bugs, and to all the billionaires with their planet-torching data centres and cosmos-defiling rocket ships.

A wave of homesickness washed over me. Not for my physical home, an ocean and a continent away, but for the stable planetary home the Surrealists and every generation before us could rely on amid the carnage and folly of their respective eras.

Benjamin tried to prepare us for this, with his picture of “wreckage upon wreckage”. When he wrote those words, he did not know that the Allies would eventually defeat the fascist forces that chased him. He also did not know that the Nazis’ crimes would be deployed to bolster the case for Zionism, a movement he opposed. Nor did he know that Israel would keep the wreckage of history piling up on a different continent, with ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, and now its genocide in Gaza.

There are days when I glance at the top news stories and they dissolve into a blur of rubble, wreckage feeding on itself. Climate-fuelled storms stir up the rubble from wars; the megafires are powerful enough to create tornadoes and lightning storms; particulates from those fires accelerate the melting of glaciers. Wreckage makes its own weather; nothing about this death-life is static.

The magnifications build up like heavy metals in us humans, too, driving us to new derangements. Climate disasters strike lands already stressed by economic immiseration, sending people deeper into poverty, lighting sparks for civil wars. Those wars send millions searching for safety on different pieces of stressed lands with different crumbling public services, made brittle from decades of systemic neglect. Speculation sends the prices of food and housing soaring; demagogues turn residents against migrants, the precariously housed against the people in tents, the people in tents against the people on drugs. Historical trauma, meanwhile, jumps from host to host with fascism’s past victims mimicking their victimisers and calling it freedom, or justice, or just their turn.

I thought of how much time we have spent battling over whether Israel is a settler colonial state like the US or a promised dream of refuge for a persecuted people. Why was this a debate? If history accumulates, there is no need to choose. It can be a settler colonial state and a refuge for a persecuted people, a place where historical trauma was passed on and magnified through the generations, until those retellings were forged into a weapon of annihilation that no one has figured out how to stop.

In the end, the difference I felt most keenly between our era and the one with which I had just communed was not about wilderness, whether in the subconscious or the natural world, but something simpler. It had to do with how we relate to each other, to the very idea of collectivity. The radical artists of the interwar period met their moment imperfectly, as humans always do. But they did meet it together, creating communities that did not merely oppose militarism and fascism, with their bodily and political dismemberments, but sought true liberation from their logics. Freedom not only in theory, but in their daily practice: in the ways their art exposed farce and artifice in bourgeois society, and in the ways they insisted on placing their art inside a wider revolutionary project.

It was this quality that most captivated Benjamin when he praised the Surrealists for their “radical concept of freedom”. In that 1929 essay, he wrestled with Surrealism’s many contradictions, yet remained transfixed by this promise. “To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution – this is the project about which Surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises,” Benjamin wrote. “This it may call its most particular task.” And it was an urgent one, because, by then, European fascists were already intoxicating the working class with their violent and apocalyptic passions.

It's difficult to read Benjamin’s century-old words and not sense an even more acute absence of both “a radical concept of freedom” and “energies of intoxication” in the movements confronting fascism today. That doesn’t mean freedom is impossible, but it does mean that as we attempt to resist new iterations of fascist politics, in their updated garb, we must reckon with the reality that we are doing so from within the wreckage of past defeats. Defeats that are not just outside of us, but inside us, too.

Perhaps this is why I was sure I was in a spiral: despite the persistence of the image of history repeating on a loop (is Trump Hitler? Is Palestine Algeria?), time doesn’t move that way. It doesn’t merely circle, it spirals, returning to places that feel familiar but are fundamentally different, having accumulated all the weight of what came before. In a downward spiral, every go-round moves to a different, tighter, more perilous place. This is the spiral of the tornado. The hurricane. The whirlpool.

But the interesting thing about spirals is that if they switch directions, they don’t tighten – they broaden, opening like sunflowers, like seashells, like galaxies. The Surrealists, as they looked out from their tormented inner psyches to the wonders of the oceans and the expanse of the cosmos, understood the power of that kind of life-generating velocity.

We cannot share in their naive, often misguided quest for parts of the world “untouched” by progress, either in nature or other people’s cultures. Nor should we try. But we still have much to learn from their efforts – from their endless manifestos, their raucous debates, their sense of play, their solidarities, and their determination to pool their collective powers to meet the scale of their moment in history. We can learn from how they tried to not only be antifascist, but be the antithesis of fascism.

As I left the Pompidou Centre, and walked past an ominous “MAKE EUROPE GREAT AGAIN” poster on the street outside, I found myself puzzling over what that would look like today, unsure if it was even possible. Do we still have it in us – or is the pile of wreckage too high?

A week later, I had a video call scheduled with someone I had never heard of before. His name was Zohran Mamdani, and he was running to be mayor of New York City. A friend in the Democratic Socialists of America had asked me to talk to him about climate policy. “He’s polling at 1% right now but he shouldn’t be underestimated. Whatever happens, we think the campaign can get some transformative ideas out there,” my friend had said.

Mamdani and I talked for an hour, and it was all about wreckage. The wreckage of the New York City bus system and the hours it stole every day from workers’ lives. The wreckage of dilapidated housing projects and the frustrations of having to wait 10 months to get the elevator fixed. The wreckage of a bipartisan political system that never wants to solve anything for everybody, and is always looking for some shiny quick fix – school vouchers, but just for some families; housing subsidies, but just for one group in need. He told me about how Donald Trump had exploited all of this brokenness to turn working-class neighbours against one another, finding scapegoats in new immigrants, or the mentally ill.

“Quick fixes aren’t going to work anymore,” he said. “It’s too broken.”

Then he told me about his plans for turning things around. Free and fast buses. Universal childcare. Freezing the rent. Municipally owned food shops in every borough, to keep prices down. Not a revolution – but changes that would start to make life feel less brittle, more expansive. He said that when he talked about those kinds of policies with New Yorkers – even ones who had cast ballots for Trump – many were ready to get on board.

For the next 12 months, I watched how he and his team pulled off what felt like a miracle. They signed up more than 100,000 volunteers, each with a singular task: talk to your neighbours, remind them why they love their city enough to want to make it better and fairer. I watched as the campaign embodied the antithesis of fascism, revelling in New York’s extraordinary linguistic, ethnic, faith and gender diversity and rejecting purity politics in favour of building the kind of power that can beat oligarch wealth. I watched as they infused the campaign with games, like a city-wide scavenger hunt (the Surrealists would have approved), and with a flow of human-created art and design that made the AI-generated slop his rivals churned out look weak and pathetic.

I traveled to New York to volunteer, and on election day, my comrades in “Jews for Zohran” fanned out across Brooklyn. We talked to all kinds of people, many of whom couldn’t wait to share that they had voted for Mamdani. But there were others who were clearly scared. They had been bombarded with lies about his supposed antisemitism and much else. Several of the attack ads were crudely designed to trigger historical trauma. Most shameful was a Yiddish-language flyer, circulated that day in Hassidic Williamsburg, that said “Mamdani for mayor means a Holocaust for Jews”.

It was ugly. It still is. But it also failed. In the Brooklyn theatre celebrating Mamdani’s decisive victory, we screamed ourselves into a kind of delirium, danced to Bollywood music and threw our arms around old friends and total strangers. Outside, crowds were waiting as if to catch a glimpse of a celebrity, but the celebrity was all of them.

This is what it must feel like to “win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”, I thought. We really ought to bottle it.

Research assistance: Oli Beeby Maglaque