Dear Colleague Letters Archive

November 9, 2004

Dear Colleague,

Henry V went to France to retake what he thought rightly belonged to him, which included the town of Harfleur. At the town's gate, he issued the following dire warning (as Shakespeare imagined it).

Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command:
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters:
Your fathers taken by their silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Whiles the mad mothers with howls confused
Do break the clouds...
What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroy'd? (Act 3, Scene 3)

    Harfleur capitulated without a fight. If only Fallujah and Ramallah would likewise capitulate! But American and Israeli commanders are forbidden such threats. They have no choice other than to subdue the rebellious towns by force.

    On a somewhat different subject, I am not sure why Iraqi fighters against the Coalition forces are called insurgents rather than terrorists. Is it because they use superior weapons and do not always need to sacrifice their own lives for their cause? And are Palestinian fighters called terrorists because, lacking such sophisticated weapons, they have to make the ultimate sacrifice? But isn't this rather strange reasoning? Shouldn't the Palestinians be given credit for their idealism (however distorted) and so be accorded the title of "insurgents", and the Iraqis, who are often able to kill without getting themselves killed, be called terrorists? Or does the difference lie in the way Americans place value on the victims? Palestinians aim to kill and have killed Israelis, or fond allies, whereas Iraqis have, up to this point, killed mostly their own people--people we have never been much fond of and who have no power to influence our domestic politics. Is this just haggling over words? After all, what does it matter? Insurgents or terrorists, they are enemies we want to eradicate. But, to a humanist geographer, words do matter. They can have physical power: witness Henry's use of them to disarm the townsmen of Harfleur. And they always reveal, brutally or subtly, how we see other people and their world.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu