The PEACE power of NON
POETRY FORMAT, 7 Oct 2019
Francisco Gomes de Matos – TRANSCEND Media Service
When to NONviolence we commit
No forms of harm we permit
When to NONkilling we commit
No forms of killing we admit
When NONviolence and
NONkilling we advocate
The DIGNITY of a PEACEFUL
LIFE we elevate
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Francisco Gomes de Matos, Ph.D. is an applied peace linguist from Recife, Brazil. He has degrees in Languages, Law, and Linguistics. He is Professor Emeritus at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco where he is active in the Dom Hélder Camara Human Rights Commission. He is one of the pioneers in Linguistic Rights (author of 1984 Plea for a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights) and in the emerging area of Peace Linguistics. Currently he is President of the Board, ABA Global Education (www.abaweb.org). He can be reached at fcardosogomesdematos@gmail.com.
Tags: Poetry
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 7 Oct 2019.
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The poetry is fine.
But the title is not appropriate. Because it is well known (seeL. Horn The Natural History of Negation, Chicago U.P., p. 84) that Non violence is a double nagtion, not equivalent to an affirmation; hence it has to be considered as a complex. The force is not that of the NON, but that of the double negation, which opens a new world of a new kind of logic, the non-classical logic.
Also the poetry conclude by changing the double nagtions in affirmations. This chanhe is the crucial point.