A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic – Joseph Stalin.

One thing that often frustrates me is the way people will avoid taking their positions to their logical conclusions.

I haven’t thought along those lines recently, but the concept was revived in my mind when I received an email , urging me to sign a petition against the Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas.

The Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas, better known as Habakkuk, is wrapped in a big controversy because of the death of a street dog in “Exhibit No. 1″, a show that took place last August in Managua (Nicaragua).

Defenders of animals in Costa Rica learned of his work through a blog yesterday and accused him of cruelty.

What we saw in Managua. As part of his presentation, the artist faced the viewer to a street dog weak, sick and hungry tied to the corner of the room.

The dog died after a day at the exhibition, as was confirmed to The Nation Marta Leonor Gonzalez, editor of the cultural supplement of La Prensa in Nicaragua.

The exhibition also included the phrase, written with dog food, “You are what you read”; as well as an audio with the Sandinista anthem backwards, photos and a burner, which burned 175 rocks of crack cocaine and an ounce of marijuana.

Habakkuk said yesterday that his work was a tribute to Natividad Canda, Nicaraguan who died after being attacked by two Rottweiler dogs in a workshop in Carthage.

“The important thing for me was the hypocrisy of people: an animal thus becomes the focus of attention when you put in a place where white people go to see art but not when they are on the street dying of hunger. The same happened to Natividad Canda, people were sensitized with him until the dog ate him,” he said.

He added: “Nobody came to free the dog nor give food or called the police. Nobody did anything. “

When questioned about whether or not he fed the animal, the artist refused to respond.

Why not use other means of expression? “I take what I see … The dog is more alive than ever because it continues to speak,” he said.

Several advocates of animal rights repudiated the work of Habakkuk, asking that they disqualify his exhibit as a work of art and suggested that the artist be excluded from Central Honduras Biennial 2008, and that he will not be one of the six representatives of the country.

“I see that this promotes cruelty to animals in a work of art. Submit a letter to prohibit cruelty in the arts and to make sure this guy does not represent the country in the Biennial,” said Gina Malavassi, defender of animals.

Jose Morales, vice president of the Special Unit for Animal Protection and Rescue, said. “The dog was tied and without food; I do not understand how that is art. “

Raymond Schnog, chairman of the Humanitarian Association for Animal Protection, said that he did not see how it was made to starve an animal if the pair had lunch with a cliché.

These organizations are studying the case to see whether there are any complaints.

The artists’ own explanation of his work is as follows.

“Hello everyone. My name is Guillermo Habacuc Vargas. I am 50 years old and an artist. Recently, I have been critisized for my work titled “Eres lo que lees”, which features a dog named Nativity. The purpose of the work was not to cause any type of infliction on the poor, innocent creature, but rather to illustrate a point. In my home city of San Jose, Costa Rica, tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought. Now, if you publicly display one of these starving creatures, such as the case with Nativity, it creates a backlash that brings out a big of hypocrisy in all of us. Nativity was a very sick creature and would have died in the streets anyway.”

There is quite clearly violence here. A sick dog has starved to death, quite pointlessly and needlessly. But if the artist had not intervened? Dogs would have starved to death, quite pointlessly and needlessly, in private, and no-one would have to take responsibility for their sins of omission. All the artist has done is to make the suffering public.

If we are to believe the protesters, it is this revelation which is violent, rather than the death of the animal, because if the animal was to die in private there would be no protest. At most, the death of the thousands of animals would evoke a mild concern. The violence must therefore be directed towards the concerned bystanders, rather than the animal itself.

Now this is quite clearly wrong.

The death of each one of those animals were in themselves acts of violence, preventable as they were. None of those animals was any less deserving of life. Suddenly, people from around the world who thought that they had no connection with the starving dogs of Costa Rica find themselves in a position where they assume moral responsibility for their wellbeing. Did that moral responsibility exist previously? If we say yes, then those people have been failing their moral duty. And if we say no, then I have to ask why moral responsibility exists now.

Now, each action we take has consequences, but these are rarely taken to their logical conclusions. Evasions and half-truths are used to defend against taking responsibility for moral stances taken. Ignorance is often willful over the consequences words, actions, silence and inaction will have. Like Adolf Eichmann, who’s only crime was making the trains run on time, these men and women can maintain a clear conscience and assert that it is those who wield the instruments of death with their own hands are guilty, not them.

At this point, I’m reminded of an anecdote from Kim Fortun’s ‘Advocacy After Bhopal‘.

A meeting was called, to discuss the way Union Carbide was poisoning the local community. Present were representatives from the company, the local government, NGOs, the EPA, and the community. It is a two hour meeting. A couple of men from the local community bring in a aquarium, filled with effluent from the plant, place it on the stage, and place a bucket with fish down beside it. They explain that they will put the fish in the aquarium, and by the end of the meeting the fish will be dead.

The lawyer from the Sierra Club begins without the calm that seemed so cultivated just moments before:

“You can’t do this” he says “Think about it. Why are we here? To kill those fish is to kill everything we believe in, everything we fight for. A few fish. It seems so insignificant, so trivial in the larger scheme of things. But to kill them would be to continue our society’s addiction to short-term goals, failing to see that these few fish are precisely what we’re after – what motivates us, guides us, symbolizes our values…”

It begins to sound like a lecture. A low murmur comes from the back, becoming a steady chant. “Kill the fish. Kill the fish. Kill the fish.”

The community was well aware of the reality of their situation, and that it was an abstraction, and a ’symbol’ to the EPA, the local government and the Sierra Club.

In the same way, as Jean Baudrillard so famously explained, the war in Iraq, the death of the poor, and many other events are not real to us, but are understood and mediated through symbols*. Most of us are never directly exposed to the realities of war, never see the dead bodies and suffering firsthand, never wail for for the dead in front us. We have to try and understand through our own comprehension of tragic events, and read from our own experiences what it must be like to be victim of these actions meted out on. My understandings of Indonesia have become a lot more ‘real’ through personally knowing people who are at risk of death, who have been imprisoned or tortured or lost family. The death of one person, we can comprehend. The death of a million remains a statistic.

I’m not going to condemn or endorse the ‘Urewera 17′ for their actions, simply because I don’t know what they have done. But they have taken their principles and decided that mere words and symbolic action are not sufficient to change the social reality of Aotearoa-New Zealand. Whether they’ve thought thoroughly through the consequences, some of which are (possibly) very serious, again I do not know. But they’ve gone much further than most people will ever do, by actually taking concrete actions to further their beliefs.

What do you believe? And what are you doing to further those beliefs?

*I should note at this stage that I haven’t read all that much on symbolic production, but intend to do a lot more in the next few months. If you want me to stop now, or at least stop posting on it, speak now or forever hold your peace :]