Madrid: Salvador Dalí wanted to enslave races he considered inferior and establish a new “sadistic” world religion, a newly discovered letter has revealed.

In the letter, which was written by Dalí in 1935, the artist proposed the enslavement of “all the coloured races” as part of a new world order that would be “anti-Christian and materialistic, based on the progress of science”.

“The domination or submission to slavery of all the coloured races” could be possible, Dalí wrote, “if all whites united fanatically”. He also insisted on the need for “human sacrifices”.

As Europe was threatened by the fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Dalí‘s letter to André Breton, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, speaks of the need for “new hierarchies, more brutal and strict than ever before” to “annihilate” Christianity.

“I believe that we surrealists are finally turning into priests,” Dalí wrote.

Scornful of Christianity’s “altruism”, he added: “We don’t want happiness for ‘all’ men, rather the happiness of some to the detriment of others”.

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The letter was recently discovered in the digitised personal archive of Sebastià Gasch, an art critic from Barcelona who died in 1982. It was published on Thursday by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.

But the artist’s fascination with Hitler and fascist sympathies were already well known. In other comments from the time, Dalí admitted that he found Hitler “exciting”. He thought Nazism was “hyper original”, seeing it as an example of surrealism in government, with the swastika as a surrealist symbol.