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    • Human Artistic Rights: a Nonkilling checklist, by Francisco Gomes de Matos

    Introductory remarks

    In my book Nurturing Nonkilling:a Poetic Plantation (Center for Global Nonkilling, 2nd ed., 2009), I included The Ultimate Universal Plea: a Nonkilling Proclamation. The first line of such text reads: "Let’s not kill artistically" (p.21). In that book s everal poems deal with what could be called Artists for Nonkilling. Poem titles and pages are given: Writers for NK (81), Poets for NK (83), Communicators for NK (85), Comicbook creators for NK (86), Filmmakers for NK (87), Composer for NK (84), Lyricists for NK (85), Photographers for NK (90), Advertising professionals for NK (91).
    The above-mentioned exhortation, Let’s not kill artistically, can be paraphrased variously:

    Let’s not kill through through an Art/the Arts
    Let’s not use any Art for killing
    Let’s never use any of the Arts killingly

    Readers interested in probing such Art-based dimension of Human Rights, should read Olivier Urbain’s chapter on Nonkilling Arts, in the volume Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm,edited by Joám Evans Pim, published November 2009 by the Center for Global Nonkilling. Urbain’s inspiring text has five sections: Quotations provided by Glenn D.Paige,Glenn Paige on the Role of the Arts in the Nonkilling Society Project, Exploring the countless roles of the Arts toward a Nonkilling world, Human qualities promoted by the Arts, Conclusion. There follows a 26-entry References, which includes Urbain (Ed) Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, published by I.B.Tauris, London,2008

    Artistic Rights: a Nonkilling Checklist

    As in my previous pieces on Human Rights, from a Nonkilling perspective, the key-question to be asked is: When do we kill artistically? Ten answers will be provided, so as to encourage, challenge readers to expand ,refine ,and contextualize the list. The purpose of this Checklist is that of generating discussion and of drawing interest to research possibilities of a problematique which calls for universal inter and transdisciplinary cooperation.

    We kill artistically when we ....

    1. speak of, refer to, define or characterize war as an art.

    Two uses of war as art immediately comes to my mind: Sunzi/Sun-Tzu’s 2,500 yeard old book, The Art of War (C.500 B.C.) and a 2000 Holywood film, The Art of War, described as an "an unexceptional action thriller” by movie critic Leonard Maltin, in his 2010 Movie Guide, p.62. We are told that that movie was followed by a DVD sequel.

    To me, stating that war is an art is antithetical to saying that Art is the creative expression of what is beautiful,humanizing,dignifying.

    This first item on the Checklist was sent to Olivier Urbain, who kindly replied by e-mail, November 10,2009,as follows:

    "This is a very important question. My first reaction is that art has several meanings. It can be equivalent to spirituality, or to just a method or technique, or to a mixture of these two. Unfortunately, it is true that war requires methods, technology, strategy, and all those elements that can be called art. In a way, one could say that war = the art of killing.

    2. Produce violent media and expose people to such potentially destructive creations which can increase hostile, hurtful actions, attitudes, feelings. The harmful effects of violent media is of increasing interest to Communication researchers, social psychologists, discourse analysts, and peace linguists.

    3. Let Architecture be affected by shameful values (greed, carelessness, or instance), causing a building or a bridge to fall down, and killing people using such constructions

    4. Advertise products which have been scientifically shown to be harmful to one’s health

    5. Create art works that depict violent actions and seem to show a morbid fascination with lethality

    6. Use graffiti to depict, rather than denounce, ways of humiliating, discriminating, and marginalizing human beings

    7. Use fictional television dramas/serials to generate animosity between groups, communities, countries. This is a most deplorable example of how imaginative writing can be at the service of a killing-prone Society. All of the arts should be created, used, shared as ways to possible Nonkilling Worlds, as Glenn D. Paige has been cogently arguing for.

    8. Communicate hyperbolically in ways which enhance rather than neutralize the killing power of language use. One example of such destructive, dehumanizing phraseology: saying that "We like person X so much, that we would even KILL for X", instead of empathically communicating that "We would die for X ". This reminds of the oft-quoted saying by Brazilian Army Marshall (General) Cândido Rondon (1865-1958): “Die if you must, but never kill.”

    Much more could be exemplified but instead, let me urge readers to contribute their items to this open-ended Checklist. Before closing, let me reiterate one of my convictions, as a practitioner of a Nonkilling Linguistics:

    Of all the Arts in which we can dignifyingly, humanizingly excel,
    there is one which universally should stand out: peacefully, nonviolently, nonkillingly living well.