Speaker 1: Also media, Oh, what's the Dodgers won the World Series?
Speaker 1: The Daughters won the World Series?
Speaker 2: Won the World Series? Not that's not the open is
Speaker 2: dressed up as a Dodger.
Speaker 1: I was dressed up as Kendle Roy.
Speaker 3: This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert is
Speaker 3: very disappointed because I had a whole bit planned to
Speaker 3: do with my guest. Oh, Margaret kill Joy, do you
Speaker 3: could think.
Speaker 1: This is a four part or do it next time?
Speaker 3: Margaret? Have you have you? How do you feel about
Speaker 3: bringing back thylacine foxes which are extinct? That's the Tasmanian tiger.
Speaker 3: But this company says they've got it figured out, they're
Speaker 3: going to be able to clone them.
Speaker 2: You know, land on that kind of stuff that I am,
Speaker 2: but I'm a little bit on like bring on the dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: Ca Yep, that's I've got.
Speaker 3: I've got a plan for how we can how we
Speaker 3: can make this work for the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: Well, Trump probably wants to bring back back the ore ox.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I honestly, I don't mind bringing back
Speaker 3: the ROX, but I would focus on the dinosaurs, and
Speaker 3: I think what we do here. You know, obviously America
Speaker 3: has a massive problem with gun violence. But we've already
Speaker 3: seen from the last like twenty years it's basically impossible
Speaker 3: to do much about it. You know, the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: particularly has come down against any kind of like functional
Speaker 3: laws on that regard. So let's work around the problem. Right,
Speaker 3: people can't die of gun violence if every American is
Speaker 3: dying early in a dinosaur park accident. And I honestly
Speaker 3: think if we rejigger our entire economy around cloning dinosaurs,
Speaker 3: putting them in parks, and then having those parks kill
Speaker 3: everyone at the park, we could solve basically all of
Speaker 3: our current domestic issues. Right, you know, nobody's going to
Speaker 3: be you know, all of this shit the GOP is
Speaker 3: going on about migrants, you know about trans people. If
Speaker 3: everyone's just dying to dinosaurs, right, you know, there's no
Speaker 3: more problems we do think every issue in American society.
Speaker 2: I think it would be good for humanity to not
Speaker 2: always be the top of the food chain. I think
Speaker 2: that if as you were getting ready to go to work,
Speaker 2: you opened the door, and like a rabbit exiting her burrow,
Speaker 2: you had to look both ways for predators.
Speaker 3: Because the Veloci raptors escaped from Disney World again, like
Speaker 3: they do every day. Yeah, yeah, okay, I think this
Speaker 3: is good. I think this solves all of our problems.
Speaker 1: Anderson's dressed is Kendall Roy from Succession, and I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of this costume.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who is a baseball? If you're watching this and
Speaker 2: you don't know what that is, h kender Roy is
Speaker 2: a baseball with the Dodger and l to the old
Speaker 2: He's the best.
Speaker 3: He's the best linebacker in the New York Yankees the.
Speaker 2: New York Lakers. Yeah, oh my god, I've got to
Speaker 2: sit the New York Yankees. But yes, that that's even
Speaker 2: better killing me, Margaret.
Speaker 3: Speaking of the Yanks, you know, that's a team for
Speaker 3: all of the rich assholes in America. But before we
Speaker 3: had the New York Yankees, we had their political equivalent,
Speaker 3: the British Empire. How do you feel about the British Empire, Magpie?
Speaker 2: Primarily negative?
Speaker 3: Primarily negative. Well, I guess that's pretty obvious because they're terrible. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what do you know about probably like the most famous
Speaker 3: hero of the British Empire of the twentieth century, Lawrence
Speaker 3: of Arabia.
Speaker 2: I know almost nothing about Lawrence of Arabia, but I'm
Speaker 2: very excited about excellent. I've been recently really interested in
Speaker 2: learning more about the Ottoman Empire. We'll be talking Ottomans.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, cool.
Speaker 3: A lot of Ottoman shit is going to be going
Speaker 3: down in this story. So this is, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: a slightly different kind of behind the Bastards episode because
Speaker 3: I think, like the title of this could be, was
Speaker 3: Lawrence of Arabia a bastard? And that's a complicated question.
Speaker 3: He is a guy who the appraisals of him have
Speaker 3: gone kind of back and forth since his death in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty five, from like, oh, you know, he was
Speaker 3: this hero of the empire and a hero of the
Speaker 3: Arab people who like backed their liberation from ottom and tyranny,
Speaker 3: to he was an agent of imperialism who like betrayed
Speaker 3: and you know, manipulated these Arabs that he claimed to
Speaker 3: care about, and has a lot to do with the
Speaker 3: modern fucked up state of much of the Middle East
Speaker 3: and the Muslim world, Like a lot of our current
Speaker 3: lot of like what's going on in Gaza right now,
Speaker 3: in fact, does have a lot of direct ties to
Speaker 3: Lawrence of Arabia. And then you know to today where
Speaker 3: I think there's another reappraisal going on, and you've even
Speaker 3: got some like left wing scholars. You were saying, well, actually,
Speaker 3: like the really critical views of this guy are not
Speaker 3: entirely fair. So it's one of those things what kind
Speaker 3: of will repeatedly revisit, Like where do we think this
Speaker 3: guy's landing? Is this guy a bastard? Is he maybe
Speaker 3: a cool person? Or is he kind of somewhere in
Speaker 3: the middle.
Speaker 2: Are you saying that historical people can be morally complex
Speaker 2: and so yes, yeh wow, absolutely, that would destroy both
Speaker 2: of our show's concepts if that were true.
Speaker 3: And it's also he is particularly hard to judge because
Speaker 3: he was a spook, right, he's a spy, you know,
Speaker 3: he is an intelligence, and so he lies to everyone
Speaker 3: constantly the entire life.
Speaker 2: Often for good reasons.
Speaker 3: A lot of his lies are like, well, I would
Speaker 3: have tried to do the same thing in his situation, right,
Speaker 3: And then a lot of his lies are like, oh,
Speaker 3: well I can see why that, Like, the guilt from
Speaker 3: doing this destroyed your entire life, Lawrence.
Speaker 2: That was pretty fucked up.
Speaker 3: So he's a guy I have always been interested in
Speaker 3: him because it was my dad's favorite movie. And I'll
Speaker 3: tell you right now. The I rewatched late last year
Speaker 3: the Lawrence of Arabia movie from the sixties whenever it.
Speaker 2: Was holds up.
Speaker 3: If you haven't seen it, I really do recommend watching
Speaker 3: it because it's fucking gorgeous. You know, it was made
Speaker 3: in an era when if you were going to make
Speaker 3: a movie about T. E. Lawrence, you sent a bunch
Speaker 3: of dudes out to the desert and you blew up
Speaker 3: trains with dynamite. There was no other way to get
Speaker 3: those shots. And that's pretty cool. I think he's also
Speaker 3: really relevant because one thing we all share as Americans,
Speaker 3: you know, whether you're left or right or centrist, is
Speaker 3: this very strange and somewhat incoherent love for insurgents, even
Speaker 3: though we also find ourselves constantly fighting and losing wars
Speaker 3: two insurgents and this all. You know, it has its
Speaker 3: roots in the kind of mythic origin of our nation,
Speaker 3: the Revolutionary War, but it also has its roots in
Speaker 3: you know, I think at this stage we have to
Speaker 3: acknowledge that George Lucas is as much a founding father
Speaker 3: of this nation as George Washington, right, and so like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's kind of impossible to separate the our
Speaker 3: love of the you know, the the Founding fathers and
Speaker 3: their insurgents struggle from like fucking rebel alliance, which we
Speaker 3: all learned about at age like four.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're going to talk about te Lawrence this week.
Speaker 3: And when I brought Lawrence up in conversations, particularly with
Speaker 3: friends who are on the left, I noticed that I
Speaker 3: think the general, the general trend is for people to
Speaker 3: write him off as like an orientalist and imperialist and
Speaker 3: you know, the British Empire's equivalent of the CIA agents
Speaker 3: who spent most of the twentieth century overthrowing democratically elected
Speaker 3: governments around the world. And it's fair to view him
Speaker 3: as all of those things. There's an extent to which
Speaker 3: all of those are accurate descriptions of the man. But
Speaker 3: he's also not someone you can ignore if you are
Speaker 3: on the left, especially if you're if you're one of
Speaker 3: these people who has ever sat around talking about like,
Speaker 3: you know, revolution and like, could you know some sort
Speaker 3: of like insurgent left wing movement, you know, take power,
Speaker 3: you know, defeat the United if any of that is
Speaker 3: shit that you care about, if you just care about
Speaker 3: you know, what's happening over in Gaza. If you're interested
Speaker 3: at all in how asymmetric warfare can topple powerful states, right,
Speaker 3: you have to study Lawrence of Arabia, because in some
Speaker 3: very important ways he invented like how warfare works in
Speaker 3: the twenty first century. Like he is the guy who
Speaker 3: created and codified our modern concept of how an insurgent
Speaker 3: struggle works, right, you know, and that's people are going
Speaker 3: to be like, well, that's ridiculous if you think of
Speaker 3: an insurgent struggle as just like some dudes who aren't
Speaker 3: regular soldiers, like ambushing imperial troops in the desert or whatever. Right,
Speaker 3: Like that's been going on for for fucking ever. Right,
Speaker 3: you know, that shit was happening when the Romans were around.
Speaker 3: It happened to the Greeks, happened to a fucking Alexander
Speaker 3: the Great Troops when they marched through Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But that's not what an act. That's not what modern
Speaker 3: insurgent warfare means. Modern insurgent warfare is a much more
Speaker 3: complicated thing that involves the use of insurgent troops alongside
Speaker 3: regular national troops and a struggle between empire that takes
Speaker 3: place over a wide geographical area, right, Like, you know,
Speaker 3: when you look at how Vietnam won their war, it
Speaker 3: wasn't that the viet Cong just outfought the Americans and
Speaker 3: the Jungles. It was that the viet Cong participated in
Speaker 3: a very complex struggle that also involved regular state forces
Speaker 3: that had the backing of other empires. And you know,
Speaker 3: that conflict took place not just as a conflict in Vietnam,
Speaker 3: but as part of a broader conflict between the Soviet
Speaker 3: Union and the United States. And the way that worked was,
Speaker 3: you know, heavily informed by a lot of the theories
Speaker 3: that Te Lawrence wrote out as a result of what
Speaker 3: he's doing in the Arab Peninsula during World War One.
Speaker 3: And to make that case, because I'm sure there's some
Speaker 3: people being like, what the fuck are you talking about, Robert,
Speaker 3: That's nonsense. I want to talk go a little bit
Speaker 3: ahead of the story right before we actually talk about
Speaker 3: Lawrence's life to something that happened about a decade after
Speaker 3: he died in nineteen four. Now, this is a story
Speaker 3: that relates to what would become the Vietnam War. But
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty six, you know that the Vietnam War,
Speaker 3: the Indo China conflict. It's not really an armed struggle
Speaker 3: quite yet. It's still at this point a disagreement over
Speaker 3: the region of Asia than known as French Indo China.
Speaker 3: During the rule of Napoleon the Third, powerful interests in
Speaker 3: the French Navy had succeeded in pushing from military control
Speaker 3: in the region that had expanded across much of modern
Speaker 3: Vietnam until their control. France's control was interrupted by Japan
Speaker 3: during World War Two. Now, if you know anything about
Speaker 3: Vietnamese history, the Vietnamese people had a long history of
Speaker 3: identifying as like, we are Vietnamese and we are not
Speaker 3: the people who are in charge of our land right now.
Speaker 3: Right Vietnam's history has a lot of occupation by foreign powers,
Speaker 3: and the end result of that is that when Japanese
Speaker 3: occupiers took over, they met with spirited resistance. Now, one
Speaker 3: of the leaders of that resistance was a man named
Speaker 3: vo When Japp, who, by any stretch of the imagination,
Speaker 3: deserves to go down as one of the great military
Speaker 3: leaders of all time, and you could argue is probably
Speaker 3: the greatest war leader of the twentieth century. During his
Speaker 3: long and storied life which ended in twenty thirteen, I
Speaker 3: had realized he made it so long. Japp led Vietnamese
Speaker 3: forces to victories against the Empire of Japan, France, the
Speaker 3: United States, and what you could either call a victory
Speaker 3: or at least a solid draw against China, and like,
Speaker 3: who else has that record? Who else could claim that shit?
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: From nineteen forty one to nineteen seventy two, he was
Speaker 3: the military commander of the Vietmen, and he orchestrated the
Speaker 3: Battle of Dian Benfu, which forced an end to French
Speaker 3: occupation of his land. Now, before Dan Binfu in nineteen
Speaker 3: forty six, it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that
Speaker 3: Japan and France were going to fight, right, the Vietnamese
Speaker 3: had helped to oust the Japanese occupier, and they were
Speaker 3: kind of there were negotiations taking place between Vaux and
Speaker 3: the Vietman and you know, the French political and military establishment,
Speaker 3: and there was at least some hope that maybe a
Speaker 3: conflict could be avoided. So Vo sits down in Hanoi
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty six for a meeting with General Raoul
Speaker 3: Salon to see if there was a way to work
Speaker 3: things out peacefully in a manner, you know, Salon at
Speaker 3: least is like in a manner that still leaves France
Speaker 3: basically in charge, right, And obviously this was a doomed measure,
Speaker 3: but they don't necessarily know that at the time. One
Speaker 3: of my sources for these episodes is the excellent book
Speaker 3: Guerrilla Leader by James Schneider, a professor of military theory
Speaker 3: at the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth.
Speaker 3: Schneider opens his book with the story of Jopp and
Speaker 3: Salon's meeting and describes it this way. Toward the end
Speaker 3: of the meeting, discussion turned towards Jop's success in resisting
Speaker 3: the Japanese occupation of Indochina since nineteen forty. Salon wanted
Speaker 3: to know the source and inspiration of Jiop's success. Without hesitation,
Speaker 3: Jiop reached behind his seat and withdrew from a shelf
Speaker 3: a heavy book and laid it before Salon, who recognized
Speaker 3: the author immediately. Jap gestured towards the book, saying, my
Speaker 3: fighting gospel is T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Speaker 3: I am never without it.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is. I mean, that's that's high
Speaker 3: praise for your book. Yeah. I hope that one day
Speaker 3: My book A Brief History of Vice is the is
Speaker 3: the bible of an insurgent leader destroying French tyranny over
Speaker 3: their land, maybe.
Speaker 2: In France, be destroying something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: This has taught me to tell all, have all of
Speaker 3: my troops mixed tobacco and their own urine together and
Speaker 3: then make themselves vomit. I think the key part of
Speaker 3: modern insurgent struggle.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I kind of can when
Speaker 2: you were saying earlier about how you know you think
Speaker 2: of gorilla warfare as like, oh no, you just like
Speaker 2: jump some people in the wood, just beat them up
Speaker 2: in the in the forest. Yeah, yeah, and like because
Speaker 2: that's the way that most movies are sort of representing
Speaker 2: guerilla warfare, because you know, that's the sexy part of
Speaker 2: a gorilla struggle over yeah right, yeah, And realizing that
Speaker 2: there's this like lineage of development of how like, just
Speaker 2: like how technology develops, so do tactics and organizational strategies.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and yeah, So realizing that, like because you'll
Speaker 2: read about the social democrat nihilist from Russia. Stepniak wrote
Speaker 2: a book on guerrilla warfare from his time fighting I
Speaker 2: actually think fighting the Ottoman Empire, but I can't remember,
Speaker 2: you know, but.
Speaker 3: That was they helped a lot of people figure that
Speaker 3: one out.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and uh, you know, but it's like, but
Speaker 2: then that's that's not the one that people are using.
Speaker 2: And then you you know, you fast forward to after
Speaker 2: World War Two. I know, a lot of people were
Speaker 2: writing like, gee, how do partisans work? You know, and
Speaker 2: so it just it really interests me that there's development
Speaker 2: also of just like literally how do you organize this stuff?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I mean and because there had to be, right,
Speaker 3: especially because the conflicts of the twentieth century are so
Speaker 3: much much wider in scope and more complex and able
Speaker 3: to be because of the level of development that exists. Right,
Speaker 3: so you need new theories of how to actually wield
Speaker 3: a modern the story of modern insurgent struggle and the
Speaker 3: kind of stuff Japp was doing, because Jiapp is not
Speaker 3: just a line level guy, right, he is thinking about
Speaker 3: grander strategy is how do you wield insurgents as a
Speaker 3: weapon in concert with the other weapons of a modern state? Right,
Speaker 3: That's the question, and that's what Lawrence is kind of
Speaker 3: a formative scholar on now at the point in nineteen
Speaker 3: forty six, that Jiapp is showing off his copy of
Speaker 3: Seven Pillars of Wisdom in this meeting. T E. Lawrence
Speaker 3: is still very famous, right. He becomes a celebrity as
Speaker 3: a result of what he does in the Middle least.
Speaker 3: That's why there's a fucking movie about him, right, And
Speaker 3: he was famous primarily as this guy who wo had
Speaker 3: helped the Allies win crucial victories over the Ottomans by
Speaker 3: welding these Arab bandits into an effective force. This is
Speaker 3: as well, like partially an accurate description of his accomplishments.
Speaker 3: But Jiapp understood better than Salon what Lawrence had really done,
Speaker 3: and as a result, Lawrence is kind of puzzled when
Speaker 3: he hears that Jiop has this copy of Lawrence's book,
Speaker 3: because Celon is like, well, this is just a guy
Speaker 3: who like taught some desert Arabs how to ambush trains. Right,
Speaker 3: that has nothing to do with fighting the Japanese in Vietnam.
Speaker 3: Why would you consider this relevant? And I'm going to
Speaker 3: continue with another passage from Schneider's book, ah Giop replied,
Speaker 3: is that your assessment of Lawrence Selon nodded a casual
Speaker 3: affirmation of course, then you have missed the whole point
Speaker 3: of Lawrence, said Jiap. He is less about fighting a
Speaker 3: guerrilla war than leading one, and leadership, Giop emphasized, is
Speaker 3: applicable in any context, desert or jungle, military or civil.
Speaker 3: And so if you're someone who might be inclined to
Speaker 3: ignore or dismiss Lawrence as just another like imperialist proto
Speaker 3: cia guy appropriating a local culture, I would encourage you
Speaker 3: to consider there's something worth finding in what Giops saw
Speaker 3: in the man, right, Yeah, And it's worth studying anyone
Speaker 3: whose work was a critical part of the strategy that
Speaker 3: led Vietnam to victory over the United States because in
Speaker 3: a lot of ways, that gave us the twenty first century. Right,
Speaker 3: you kind of have to study a guy who can
Speaker 3: do that. And I will say one of the through
Speaker 3: lines of the story, we'll be reading some quotes from
Speaker 3: separate pillars of wisdom. One of the things that makes
Speaker 3: Lawrence a powerful insurgent leader, which is part of why
Speaker 3: I like the story, is that he's an excellent writer.
Speaker 3: He's just an actually incredibly talented, beautiful prose and that's
Speaker 3: a big part of why he is an influential military theorist,
Speaker 3: and I kind of like that.
Speaker 2: That's cool. I'm want to read Seven Pillars now.
Speaker 3: It's great, Yeah it is. It's actually very very good
Speaker 3: and is now historians have gone back and forth on this,
Speaker 3: but like modern historiography will agree, gen't really accurate. As
Speaker 3: we'll talk about, there's a couple of areas where Lawrence
Speaker 3: probably lied or at least may have lied, but generally
Speaker 3: accurate to what happened. So Schneider's book makes a pretty
Speaker 3: good case for Lawrence as like the father of modern
Speaker 3: insurgent warfare. My main issue with his book is that
Speaker 3: he focuses on like the how and a lot of
Speaker 3: just kind of the military nuts and bolts, and as
Speaker 3: a result, his story leaves out something that the nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty two movie leaves out, which is, why would a
Speaker 3: guy born into like the comfortable upper middle class of
Speaker 3: life in the British Empire choose to become, you know,
Speaker 3: a leader, not the leader of an Arab revolt against
Speaker 3: Ottoman power?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: How do we get there? And that's the story we're
Speaker 3: going to tell today. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on
Speaker 3: August sixteenth.
Speaker 2: Eighteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3: Before this section, sure you know who else was born
Speaker 3: on August sixteenth, eighteen eighty eight in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 3: Probably not our sponsors. They're probably Donald Trump again. Oh god,
Speaker 3: there's a good chance.
Speaker 2: I missed the gambling ads. I miss them too, No Chumba,
Speaker 2: Maybe not by the time this comes out. Yeah, we'll see,
Speaker 2: no said, will be an ad for gorilla warfare. Yea
Speaker 2: gerrilla warfare.
Speaker 3: Disappointed about the election results, you know, one way or
Speaker 3: the other, A lot of people are going to be
Speaker 3: thinking about guerrilla warfare in the wake of this election
Speaker 3: coming up in a couple of days. So that's part
Speaker 3: of why I wrote these episodes. Uh, and we're back.
Speaker 3: So Lawrence was born in maybe the most ridiculously named
Speaker 3: region of Great Britain Trinidog trimid Dog, Carnovanshire, Wales, which
Speaker 3: I know I've pronounced wrong. I don't like, fuck you people,
Speaker 3: look at that trimid dog. What does that even mean?
Speaker 3: That sounds like that sounds like medicine for fleas or
Speaker 3: like if your dog's too fat, you give it trima dog. Right,
Speaker 3: It's just like, excuse.
Speaker 1: Me, I'm sure you're not body shamed dogs.
Speaker 2: Excuse me, I'm.
Speaker 3: Not I'm just saying, if you were selling that medicine,
Speaker 3: like if you're selling dog o zimbic, you call it
Speaker 3: trima dog dog o zimbi has to be a thing, right,
Speaker 3: there's no way that's not coming.
Speaker 2: I really hope not. But you're probably Oh no, there's
Speaker 2: no way.
Speaker 3: There's no way that's not gonna There's no way that
Speaker 3: there's no way there aren't people who are already shooting
Speaker 3: ozimbic into their cloned dogs. I love, that's definitely happening.
Speaker 2: Drugs just go both directions real quick now, like horse
Speaker 2: drugs for humans.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Me, you came over the other day and we're
Speaker 3: talking about how like rintros on trasa doone and hey,
Speaker 3: so am iras a buddies.
Speaker 2: No, it made it great when I was I was
Speaker 2: in a place that was never mind, I want to
Speaker 2: I don't want to tell you anything about how I
Speaker 2: acquired some I've always gone through the problem channels to get.
Speaker 3: I love the proper channels, Margaret, speaking of the proper channels.
Speaker 3: Lawrence comes from a line of people who did things
Speaker 3: through the proper channels. His father was not born a Lawrence.
Speaker 3: He was instead born a member of the Landed nobility,
Speaker 3: Sir Thomas Chapman. Now Lawrence's his family, like Lawrence's ancestors,
Speaker 3: are the literal Irish landlords responsible for like so much
Speaker 3: of that island's misery, Like when you read about like
Speaker 3: those like absentee, Like, that's Lawrence's people, right, that's the
Speaker 3: line he comes from. So Lawrence's dad's family, the Chapman's,
Speaker 3: they send Sir Thomas Lawrence to Eton, where he is
Speaker 3: abused and molested into being a proper young inheritor of
Speaker 3: the empire. And he was, by all accounts a normal
Speaker 3: boy of the landed nobility until he marries someone who
Speaker 3: is like a bad match for him, which is not
Speaker 3: unusual in his social class. But he is not capable
Speaker 3: of being happy and like a loveless marriage. And also
Speaker 3: you know, he's a romantic. He's a romantic, and his
Speaker 3: bride only gives him daughters, right, so he's like also
Speaker 3: not thrilled about that. So, like many men of his
Speaker 3: social standing, he picks up a mistress and he brings
Speaker 3: her to Dublin, where she gets pregnant with his child.
Speaker 3: This child comes out of boy, which is what he
Speaker 3: had wanted, and he makes the incredibly questionable decision to
Speaker 3: give his bastard child his name. Right, Hell yeah, now
Speaker 3: it's herd. That's not if you're trying to keep this
Speaker 3: on the down low, which you're supposed to do, that's
Speaker 3: a bad way to do it. This does not lead
Speaker 3: to a sustainable situation with his other legal family, and
Speaker 3: everything falls apart for Sir Thomas, and one of the
Speaker 3: things like there's there's this fucked up old timey stuff.
Speaker 2: This is dad.
Speaker 3: Sir Thomas is Lawrence of Arabia's dad. Last Lawrence is
Speaker 3: a bastard, right, So Sir Thomas, what's interesting about him
Speaker 3: to me because up until this, like, oh, he's not
Speaker 3: happy that his Mary, his legal wife, only gave him daughters.
Speaker 3: So he has a mistress and a secret family. That's
Speaker 3: not weird. What's weird is that when this gets exposed
Speaker 3: and his life falls apart, he's just like, fuck it.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be a nobleman anymore. I have
Speaker 3: no attraction to this social circle. So he makes a
Speaker 3: deal with his wife. You get all the land, you
Speaker 3: get nearly all of the income. I'm going to keep
Speaker 3: a small portion of the income so I don't have
Speaker 3: to ever work a job. But you get like ninety
Speaker 3: percent of everything right, and I'm just not going to
Speaker 3: be a chapman anymore. I'm going to disappear and live
Speaker 3: under a new name and raise my bastard son and
Speaker 3: live with my mistress who I actually love. Is that
Speaker 3: cool with you? And his wife is like sure, that's
Speaker 3: a good deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now you don't have to have a husband.
Speaker 3: It seems like a pretty good deal given that this
Speaker 3: is the eighteen eighties. Yeah, so yeah, they do this,
Speaker 3: and Sir John moves out of Ireland to Wales and
Speaker 3: he takes up a new name with his still a mistress,
Speaker 3: never legally a wife, and they become known as mister
Speaker 3: and missus Thomas Lawrence, even though again they're never legally married.
Speaker 3: So that's where Lawrence's name comes from. It's not his
Speaker 3: real name, it's the name is Dad Picks after abandoning
Speaker 3: his life as a member of the landed nobility to
Speaker 3: go live with his mistress in Wales, as we all
Speaker 3: hope to do one day. So t E Lawrence was
Speaker 3: their second son. He was born in Trimidoc, not long
Speaker 3: after Thomas's old life fell apart. Now his dad is
Speaker 3: racked with guilt over what happened, right, he does seem
Speaker 3: to feel bad about a lot of aspects of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but their daughters aren't super excited about I.
Speaker 3: Bet his daughters aren't thrilled. But Yeah. Lawrence's mother, Sarah Lawrence,
Speaker 3: which is very funny that that's her name, was the
Speaker 3: self herself the child of an unwed, illegitimate union. So
Speaker 3: she actually doesn't feel bad about this at all, and
Speaker 3: she is by far the domineering force in the relationship.
Speaker 3: Like you get the feeling Lawrence's dad is kind of
Speaker 3: a sad sack and his mom is like, shut the
Speaker 3: fuck up, like you don't have to work, like good,
Speaker 3: Like chill the fuck out. There's nothing wrong with the
Speaker 3: fact that we were not married and having kids. Like
Speaker 3: she's Irish or English. I think she's English. Her name
Speaker 3: is Sarah Lawrence, which does sound like an English name.
Speaker 3: Lawrence would later write that his mom saw their father
Speaker 3: as quote her trophy of power. Lawrence has some mom issues,
Speaker 3: but also I don't see any reason why this is
Speaker 3: necessarily wrong. He describes her as a very controlling woman
Speaker 3: and his father as like kind of a mild person. Now,
Speaker 3: one of the things that's really unique about Lawrence's dad.
Speaker 3: He is in a very i mean not just a
Speaker 3: rarity for the age, but he's almost a singular figure
Speaker 3: in that he is an attentive, full time father. Right.
Speaker 3: He never has to work and he has no social
Speaker 3: obligations to keep up, so he pours all of his
Speaker 3: interest into being there all of the time to raise
Speaker 3: his kids, which.
Speaker 2: Like doesn't happen, no, but it's like certain people's dream yeah,
Speaker 2: like stay at home dad. Like yeah, money's taken care
Speaker 2: of by inheritance or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he is living a lot of
Speaker 3: people's dreams. And it's just so interesting to me that,
Speaker 3: like Lawrence is like the one guy in nineteen in
Speaker 3: Victorian England who's raised by like a responsible dad, at
Speaker 3: least responsible to his sons. In the wonderful book The
Speaker 3: Young te Lawrence biographer Anthony Satin writes that Lawrence and
Speaker 3: his four brothers never quote had an unhappy or even
Speaker 3: an unsettled life. They moved more often in their first
Speaker 3: few years than most families moved in a lifetime, but
Speaker 3: they were close knit and well loved. Now from an
Speaker 3: early age, their parents don't inform them of their actual
Speaker 3: lineage of like all everything that went down with dad
Speaker 3: before they became Lawrence's But from an early age, te
Speaker 3: and his brother ned they're very smart kids, and they
Speaker 3: have inklings that they might be bastards, although they think
Speaker 3: for a very different reason. Right, they think that like
Speaker 3: basically there was cheating going on within between their parents
Speaker 3: as opposed to the real story.
Speaker 2: Right, they think their dad isn't their dad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think their dad isn't their dad. Now, this
Speaker 3: is this is something that is a trauma to a
Speaker 3: degree for young Thomas because he and his family they're
Speaker 3: very religious. They're raised incredibly strictly in the church, and
Speaker 3: sex out of wedlock is a big deal. The guilt
Speaker 3: his father felt, which eventually compelled him to reveal the
Speaker 3: truth to his sons in a deathbed letter, may have
Speaker 3: bled over to them in some way. Whatever the truth,
Speaker 3: Lawrence wrote himself about being dogged by a peculiar sense
Speaker 3: of worthlessness his whole life. Right, this is the way
Speaker 3: this manifest is he always kinds of things. I'm just
Speaker 3: a piece of shit, Like I don't believe anywhere. I'm
Speaker 3: a bad person. I come from nothing, you know, I
Speaker 3: don't deserve anything. This is like he's he's got imposter
Speaker 3: syndrome his whole life, despite the fact that he is
Speaker 3: he is not just a smart kid. He is clearly
Speaker 3: a genius. And when I say a genius, I mean
Speaker 3: that as a small boy, he develops a scholarly fascination
Speaker 3: and like a professional scholarly level of knowledge of medieval
Speaker 3: art history. In order to indulge this knowledge, he would
Speaker 3: travel around on foot and through bicycle to different historic sites,
Speaker 3: either on his own or with a small group of
Speaker 3: friends to His hobby is to make rubbings of brass
Speaker 3: reliefs of crusaders and kings from various tombs and churches.
Speaker 2: Right, a normal kid, like.
Speaker 3: A normal kid. Yeah, just a normal kid. Now, this
Speaker 3: is even for the day, a nerdy hobby, right, kids,
Speaker 3: are you know reading fucking at least kids of this
Speaker 3: level of wealth or reading like fucking the Iliad in
Speaker 3: grade school? But this is nerd for that day. Right.
Speaker 2: He started to do original research on the alien and
Speaker 2: he's doing like original historiography, and Lawrence takes the nerdiness
Speaker 2: up a notch by developing an obsession with fidelity and
Speaker 2: completion that modern.
Speaker 3: Day like nerd collectors will recognize, this is a kid
Speaker 3: who in the modern era probably would have gotten way
Speaker 3: too into like warhammer or something. Right, and I'm going
Speaker 3: to put again from Anthony Sattin's biography, it was typical
Speaker 3: of Lawrence that his interest should become obsessive. His principal collaborator,
Speaker 3: his childhood friend, Cyril Beeson, known by his school nickname
Speaker 3: of Scroggs, remembered that it was no collector's hobby. There
Speaker 3: were experiments in the technique of rubbing with different grades
Speaker 3: of heelball, a mix of lamp black and wax and paper,
Speaker 3: assisted by friendly advice from shoemakers and paperhangers who shop
Speaker 3: supplied our raw materials. Another school friend described the outings
Speaker 3: as a ransacking. Nothing stood in Lawrence's way, So if
Speaker 3: Brass's were hidden behind some pews, Lawrence, already ruthless, made
Speaker 3: short work of the obstruction. And I still hear the
Speaker 3: splintering woodwork, and his short laugh almost sinister to my
Speaker 3: timorous ears. So he's he's both like he will destroy
Speaker 3: any like you don't give a fuck about those pews.
Speaker 3: He will break and damage church property to get to
Speaker 3: these goddamn reliefs that he's going to do rubbing.
Speaker 2: Zod this is such a perfect British orientalist yes style
Speaker 2: thing to get into, like, I'm gonna find the history
Speaker 2: even if I have to destroy everything between me and it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: He is fucking child tomb raider. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, Lawrence is despite his brilliance and uneven student when
Speaker 3: he was interested in a type I think today there,
Speaker 3: I don't know what kind of neurodivergent he would be
Speaker 3: diagnosed as, but made probably all of them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: One thing that is written about him is that if
Speaker 3: he was interested in a topic, he would be he
Speaker 3: would be so far beyond every other student in the
Speaker 3: class in that topic, you'd be like at the teachers level.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: And if he wasn't interested in something, he couldn't do
Speaker 3: the work at all. He was, he was completely non functional.
Speaker 2: Right now, we can identify with this pretty hard.
Speaker 3: You're going to identify very hard with the next thing
Speaker 3: we talk about here, because he is the way to
Speaker 3: look at him. He is an early iconoclastic example of
Speaker 3: a nerd. Right. He is a proto geek. Right, and
Speaker 3: he is I even wrote this in the script not
Speaker 3: dissimilar in some ways to our guest for these episodes,
Speaker 3: Margaret Killjoy and let me make that case now. At
Speaker 3: age fifteen, Lawrence leads his friends on raids through Oxford's
Speaker 3: libraries to learn the secrets of how to make chainmail
Speaker 3: and other medieval arms and armor for themselves.
Speaker 2: And he was doing when I was so our school
Speaker 2: had to ban us for making chain mail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is what Lawrence is doing as a kid.
Speaker 3: He's like the very first generation of Western kid doing this.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: They're making their own chain mail, their own weapon. They're
Speaker 3: teaching themselves how to fight by reading medieval man manuals.
Speaker 3: They learn how to speak appropriate old English and draw
Speaker 3: heraldry from memory. Like this kid's soul is a wren
Speaker 3: fair right, and Lawrence is one of those kids. His
Speaker 3: interest in medieval history is always married with this deep
Speaker 3: care for the fine details, for fidelity. One of his
Speaker 3: hobbies he starts a hobby of like buying shards of
Speaker 3: pottery from excavations in the city. Right, people will be
Speaker 3: doing construction and they will they will turn up some
Speaker 3: old pottery shards, and his hobby is like buy them
Speaker 3: and meticulously glue them back together. And he is so
Speaker 3: good at this as a teenage boy that local Oxford
Speaker 3: museum still keep and display pieces that he rebuilt from
Speaker 3: like the Roman era, Like he's that level of skill
Speaker 3: that like even today his work as a child is
Speaker 3: recognized as like pretty good.
Speaker 2: He was pretty good at that.
Speaker 3: So they made the case very bright kid, probably probably
Speaker 3: fair to call a genius, the kind of.
Speaker 2: Person who's going to do something really good or really terrible. Right,
Speaker 2: as you've pointed out, somehow both.
Speaker 3: Somehow, both certainly significant. Now for his own part, Lawrence
Speaker 3: described his education at Oxford High School with the words
Speaker 3: very little, very reluctantly, and very badly. Right. That's how
Speaker 3: he talks about his like the end of his primary
Speaker 3: school education. We can into it from some details that
Speaker 3: we do have that he was the recipient of a
Speaker 3: fair amount of bullying, as you would guess from a
Speaker 3: child who is gluing together pottery sharks, like the.
Speaker 2: Most infamous bully academy in history, the School for making psychopaths.
Speaker 3: Yes, he develops as a child a hatred for bullies
Speaker 3: that is going to be with him his entire life,
Speaker 3: and that, at age sixteen spurs him into some disastrous action.
Speaker 3: In this particularly notable incident, one of his friends is
Speaker 3: being picked on by an older kid, and Lawrence intervenes,
Speaker 3: but he is not a large boy, right, This other
Speaker 3: kid is much bigger. Lawrence intervenes because it's the right
Speaker 3: thing to do, and the fight goes so badly that
Speaker 3: his leg is broken enough that he misses a semester
Speaker 3: in school. Right like he has rendered an invalid for
Speaker 3: months because of how badly this kid beats the shit
Speaker 3: out of him. His mother is convinced that the injury
Speaker 3: stops him from growing into what should have been his
Speaker 3: full height, although that's probably just not biologically true. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote again from Satin's book here. The
Speaker 3: injury exacerbated Lawrence's reluctance to join in. His eldest brother, Bob,
Speaker 3: remembered that he was good at gymnastics and took part
Speaker 3: in games in the playground, but Ned admitted that I've
Speaker 3: never since I was able to think, played any game
Speaker 3: through to the end. At school, they used to stick
Speaker 3: me in football are cricket teams, and I would always
Speaker 3: trickle away from the field before the match ended. The
Speaker 3: obvience reason might have been physical, but Lawrence later thought
Speaker 3: there were other more complex issues behind his avoidance of
Speaker 3: team sports. Because they were organized, because they had rules,
Speaker 3: because they had results. I find that so interesting.
Speaker 2: I identify with this.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So if yeah, it's hard not to Yeah. Yeah. So.
Speaker 3: Schneider, who's not as detailed as Satin when it comes
Speaker 3: to dissecting Lawrence's personality in life, posits that Lawrence's ditaste
Speaker 3: for organized sports has something to do with the fact
Speaker 3: that he preferred to lead rather than follow. Now, I
Speaker 3: think that's probably him working backwards and maybe an error.
Speaker 3: The quote from Lawrence that Satin presents is a more
Speaker 3: interesting explanation. They're organized, they have rules, and those rules
Speaker 3: aren't my rules, right. I don't understand why things are
Speaker 3: doing this this way, and I don't like just saying, well,
Speaker 3: this is the way.
Speaker 2: Things are done. Yeah.
Speaker 3: In the summer of nineteen oh five, Lawrence cycled to
Speaker 3: France with his father. This was not his first taste
Speaker 3: of freedom again. He traveled extensively across the UK on
Speaker 3: foot and by bike, motivated partly by a desire to
Speaker 3: get away from his mom. But the trip to France
Speaker 3: awakens something in him, and for the next several years
Speaker 3: he feels this obsession with like I need to get
Speaker 3: out there, I need to travel. But unfortunately he's got
Speaker 3: to go to college. He attends Jesus College at Oxford.
Speaker 3: Oxford is people talk about it as Oxford, but it's
Speaker 3: actually like five colleges, and Jesus is one of them, right.
Speaker 2: And this is a college called Jesus. There's Jesus College.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it just called Jesus. It just called Jesus. I
Speaker 3: mean maybe they have a seminary degree, but that's not
Speaker 3: what he's doing. He's getting an undergraduate degree. He's a
Speaker 3: history dude, and he hates college. He hates it even
Speaker 3: more than high school. He hates his undergraduate college. So
Speaker 3: he has to find outside ways to stimulate himself. And
Speaker 3: so in nineteen oh six, at age eighteen, he takes
Speaker 3: himself alone on a twenty four hundred mile cycling trip
Speaker 3: through France into the Greek coast. Now this is price
Speaker 3: doesn't touch Greece. That's a long that's a.
Speaker 2: Long bicycle trip.
Speaker 3: And this is I think this is his equivalent of
Speaker 3: if we're going back to the Margaret comparisons like being
Speaker 3: a trained kid, right, because he takes this This is
Speaker 3: not just about seeing, you know, France, It's not just
Speaker 3: about cycling. It is an exercise in aestheticism. Lawrence wants
Speaker 3: to see how tough he is. Part of the goal
Speaker 3: is he eats as little as possible because he wants
Speaker 3: to explore how little food can take me? Can I
Speaker 3: live on while I going this distance? Right? And there's
Speaker 3: also this intellectual dimension to it. He spends the entire visit,
Speaker 3: he goes through every medieval church and castle on this
Speaker 3: route through France to Greece, and he analyzes the architecture
Speaker 3: in exhausting detail. And Schneider makes a supposition here that
Speaker 3: I think is well founded, which is that he thinks
Speaker 3: this journey is integral to Lawrence's growth into an insurgent
Speaker 3: leader because it demanded and it cultured him in physical toughness.
Speaker 3: And he's also pay it's training him how to pay
Speaker 3: close surgical attention to his environment. And I have trouble
Speaker 3: like arguing with that that contention here.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's like it's it's a little bit reading backwards,
Speaker 2: but it's also right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not necessarily wrong. Now, when you string too
Speaker 3: many details together like that in a podcast, it can
Speaker 3: make the man Lawrence seem kind of like an automaton
Speaker 3: of history rather than a teenage boy. So one thing
Speaker 3: I value Satin for is he includes details from this
Speaker 3: trip like that, Lawrence, while he's you know, starving himself
Speaker 3: and biking thousands of miles and taking meticulous historical notes
Speaker 3: about all these castles and churches and stuff, he's writing
Speaker 3: his mom letters constantly telling her that he's not going
Speaker 3: to tell her any details about his journey. All I'm
Speaker 3: going to tell you, mom, is descriptions of the buildings
Speaker 3: that I've seen. And he does this so many times
Speaker 3: that you have to conclude this is him kind of
Speaker 3: sticking back at his mom because she's so controlling, Like,
Speaker 3: fuck you, Mom.
Speaker 2: You don't know me.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to tell you anything about my trip.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to describe these buildings to you, like
Speaker 3: a little shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He also probably like fell in love like three
Speaker 2: separate times on that trip. Yes, yes you have.
Speaker 3: Well maybe not, Margaret. We're going to talk about that.
Speaker 3: This Lawrence of Arabia may low key be our first
Speaker 3: behind the Bastard's Ace icon. Oh okay, yeah, well but
Speaker 3: we're building to that. Or he's a pedophile one of
Speaker 3: the two. Mark I, let's hope for ace.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Lawrence's journey ends on the Greek coast with a
Speaker 3: miserable case of malaria. He is also just sick constantly,
Speaker 3: which I think is just unavoidable if you travel in
Speaker 3: this period of time, Like if you are a world
Speaker 3: traveler in the late Victorian era, you are dying of
Speaker 3: fucking typhus or malaria or something eighty percent of your
Speaker 3: waking hours. But while he's kind of trying to survive malaria,
Speaker 3: he gets a view across the Aegean of distant Turkey
Speaker 3: and this ignites something in him. Later he would write,
Speaker 3: I felt that at last I had reached the way
Speaker 3: to the South, and all the glorious East, Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tears, Syria, Italy, Spain,
Speaker 3: Sicily Crete, they were all there and all within reach
Speaker 3: of me. I fancy I now know better than Keats
Speaker 3: what Cortes felt like, silent upon a peak, and Darian, Oh,
Speaker 3: I must get down here farther out again. Really, this
Speaker 3: getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance.
Speaker 3: I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow. So he's
Speaker 3: just the fact that he has to go back to school,
Speaker 3: go back to England, so close to this this world
Speaker 3: that he's just been reading about all of his classical
Speaker 3: education and like the Crusades and whatnot. It's like a
Speaker 3: wound in his soul that he can't just keep traveling.
Speaker 2: It's like I think for I think for a lot
Speaker 2: of the Victorian, especially English, it's kind of like reaching
Speaker 2: the world of fairy Like. Yeah, in the orientalist's mind,
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, I have discovered the place where none
Speaker 2: of the rules make sense, and I don't belong in
Speaker 2: this world. So here's this other world, you know, like
Speaker 2: Byron and all those people were like obsessed with the
Speaker 2: Near East for that reason, you know.
Speaker 3: And if you were nerd in this period, there's not
Speaker 3: Tolkien to fall into. They're certainly not like Star Wars,
Speaker 3: but you have classic history and medieval history, right, And
Speaker 3: so is for him like if someone today, if you
Speaker 3: were to just stumble into Middle Earth, like right, like
Speaker 3: that that's how he feels about it, and like that
Speaker 3: is orientalism, right, Like that's a factor in orientalism. But
Speaker 3: it's also when you think about it from the perspective
Speaker 3: not of someone of power, but of this like boy
Speaker 3: who's just been has this obsessive interest in the history
Speaker 3: of this era area. There's a degree that you have
Speaker 3: to be kind of sympathetic too at this stage where
Speaker 3: it's like, well, yeah, of course he felt this way.
Speaker 2: Because Orientalism is really complex because you have both of
Speaker 2: the like Orientalists like, oh, we're going to go over
Speaker 2: there and steal all your mummies and smoke them, and
Speaker 2: that's like coming from like power, I would smoke a mummy.
Speaker 2: I would smoke a mummy. Mar no fair. But there's
Speaker 2: also just this like well that's there's this also kind
Speaker 2: of putting on a pedestal, which is also not always great,
Speaker 2: but there's like like there's a weed.
Speaker 3: No, it's problematic too, but yeah, it's he and he's
Speaker 3: from the web side of things right now. Once he
Speaker 3: becomes a graduate student, his enjoyment of school improves mark
Speaker 3: because the pedagogical style and that part of Oxford once
Speaker 3: you hit your graduate era, instead of just being like
Speaker 3: you have to learn and memorize these things we say,
Speaker 3: which is just torture. For Lawrence, it's like, hey, what
Speaker 3: are you interested in? Our job as your advisors is
Speaker 3: to find the areas of interest you're in and like
Speaker 3: figure out why working with you ways that you can
Speaker 3: contribute to academia that you can move and like that
Speaker 3: Lawrence excels in right once, that's what school is. He
Speaker 3: does very well. So Lawrence and his advisor talk themselves
Speaker 3: into an idea for how he might combine his desire
Speaker 3: to travel further east, which had been sparked by his
Speaker 3: first vision of the Greek shoreline, and his obsessive interest
Speaker 3: in medieval architecture. A major debate at the time centered
Speaker 3: around the presence of castles built by European crusaders in
Speaker 3: the Middle East that had structures in common with some
Speaker 3: of the structure scene in classical medieval European castles, and
Speaker 3: the question was does this mean that Europeans introduced certain
Speaker 3: architectural methods to the Arab world or was it the
Speaker 3: reverse Crusaders learned local techniques from you know, local people
Speaker 3: in you know, the Arab world during the crusades and
Speaker 3: then took them home with them, right, And so medieval
Speaker 3: castles are actually, in large part an example of knowledge
Speaker 3: transfer from the Muslim world to the West, right, right,
Speaker 3: which is I think largely true. It's agreed obviously, like
Speaker 3: this is the kind of thing that's more complicated than
Speaker 3: we're going to exhaustively like tease out an episode of
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards a podcast by two people who don't
Speaker 3: know much about my medieval architecture. But Lawrence, I think
Speaker 3: the agreement is that he was onto something here, right,
Speaker 3: And obviously he's not the one who started this idea,
Speaker 3: other people had proposed it. But he's going to actually
Speaker 3: contribute significantly to like historia historological debate in this measure, right,
Speaker 3: So Satin writes, quote, Lawrence decided to take a broader
Speaker 3: view of the topic and to question whether the skill
Speaker 3: to build a castle, not just a pointy arch, had
Speaker 3: come from the East. The accepted view championed at that
Speaker 3: time by Charles Ohmann, professor of history at Oxford, was
Speaker 3: that the Europeans marched east with hardly any understanding of
Speaker 3: fortifications and learned from the Byzantines how to build the
Speaker 3: magnificent castles they have left in the levant. According to Aman,
Speaker 3: much of what Lawrence had admired in France had its
Speaker 3: origins elsewhere, but neither ormand Know any of the others,
Speaker 3: nor any of the other scholars who had written about
Speaker 3: this period had traveled to Syria and Palestine to see
Speaker 3: the buildings, relying instead on historical documents for evidence to
Speaker 3: support their theories. Now, this is something that's going to
Speaker 3: be a thing for Lawrence's whole working life, which is
Speaker 3: that he's willing to go places other people of his
Speaker 3: status aren't. And he always prefers to do the most difficult,
Speaker 3: dangerous version of any task set before him. Right. He
Speaker 3: is not someone who is like comfortable making inferences or
Speaker 3: assumptions without actually getting his hands dirty. So he decides,
Speaker 3: I'm going to go to the Middle East to take
Speaker 3: part specifically, I'm going to go to Turkey to take
Speaker 3: part in, you know, a dig in some of these
Speaker 3: classical ruins, and I'm going.
Speaker 2: To start that.
Speaker 3: Before I go over to Turkey, I'm gonna do a
Speaker 3: walking tour of Syria. Now, he has warned ahead of time,
Speaker 3: no one, no European does this, right, it's too hot,
Speaker 3: it's too dangerous. You need a guide in servants to
Speaker 3: carry your luggage and whatnot. And Lawrence is like, no,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to walk on my own, right, I'm
Speaker 3: gonna carry my own shit, and like I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 3: going to.
Speaker 2: Invent backpacking as a hobby. Yeah, yeah, So weirds are
Speaker 2: we talking about here?
Speaker 3: We are talking nineteen oh six, Okay, yeah, so he
Speaker 3: says he's gonna do this, and his Yeah, his advisors
Speaker 3: like Europeans don't walk in Syria, and Lawrence's response is,
Speaker 3: well I do. Which hard not to like this guy,
Speaker 3: I know. So he takes his first steps into the
Speaker 3: Arab world during a fascinating time in relations between his
Speaker 3: country and the end. Again, when I say the air world,
Speaker 3: Syria is the Arab world. Obviously Turkey is not. Turks
Speaker 3: are not Arabs, I want to be clear that I'm
Speaker 3: not like conflating the two. I'm gonna be using a
Speaker 3: lot of terms that like, because he travels extensively in
Speaker 3: the Middle East. He travels extensively in the Near East,
Speaker 3: which is more accurate to call Turkey. Yeah, and he travels.
Speaker 3: He spends a lot of time both on the Arab
Speaker 3: Peninsula and in modern day Syria and Iraq. Right, that's
Speaker 3: all of his like stomping grounds. But at this stage
Speaker 3: he's kind of walking through Syria, going through the Holy
Speaker 3: Land and getting to like kind of the Ottoman heartland, right, Like,
Speaker 3: that's the gist of this trip. And he takes this
Speaker 3: during a fascinating time in relations between his country and
Speaker 3: the Ottoman Empire, which was well in decline by the
Speaker 3: mid eighteen hundreds, riven by unrest and constantly picked at
Speaker 3: by expansionist csars and quarrelsome Serbs. By eighteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: Great Britain had actually come into the Crimean War on
Speaker 3: the side of the Ottomans, not because like, oh, they're
Speaker 3: being picked on, but because, like, if the Ottomans fall
Speaker 3: and Russia, you know, stins the Russian Empire across like
Speaker 3: fucking Constantinople, then we don't have a bulwark against this
Speaker 3: country that we see as a geopolitical rival. Right.
Speaker 2: You're saying that the Western Powers need to have an
Speaker 2: ally in the.
Speaker 3: Yes, in the struggle against Russia. Yes, and in this
Speaker 3: case it's the Ottomans. The British had another reason for
Speaker 3: wanting good relations with the Ottomans that's even more selfish,
Speaker 3: which is that the Sultan of the Empire, and again
Speaker 3: this is a Turk is the Khalif of Islam. Right now,
Speaker 3: this does not in fact make him. The way a
Speaker 3: lot of Europeans take this is that like he's the
Speaker 3: Pope of Islam, right, which is kind of the case,
Speaker 3: but also really not the case in the hearts of
Speaker 3: most Muslims. Because like a shitload of the Muslim population
Speaker 3: or Arab right, and so they both are co religionists
Speaker 3: with the Khalif and also are oppressed and ruled by
Speaker 3: the Turks and not happy with it necessarily.
Speaker 2: Right, starting to get kind of more of the rise
Speaker 2: of Turkish nationalists. I'm during this period.
Speaker 3: Turkish nationalism and Arab nationalism is starting. I meant to say, yes, well,
Speaker 3: I mean Turkish nationalism is also a major factor.
Speaker 2: And what's happening, yeah, right, but in like opposite directions, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Arab nationalism is it tenants against y.
Speaker 3: And as we're talking about, we'll talk about the Turkish
Speaker 3: nationalism is like everyone in this entire wide region of
Speaker 3: the world are Turks. There are no Arabs, there are
Speaker 3: no Kurds, You're just mountain Turks.
Speaker 2: Have lost your.
Speaker 3: Language, right, which a lot of Turkish people still still
Speaker 3: argue for today. It's kind of a major factor in
Speaker 3: what's happening in Rajava. So anyway, a lot of Europeans assume, oh,
Speaker 3: this Khalif is like the king of Islam, and so
Speaker 3: you know, we have India, the Gym and the crown
Speaker 3: of the British Empire with this massive Muslim population, and
Speaker 3: we have constant issues with uprisings, and if the Khalif
Speaker 3: gets pissed at us, he might call for a jihad
Speaker 3: from these Indian Muslims, and who knows what will happen then, right,
Speaker 3: which is not like a complete non factor as a threat,
Speaker 3: But they're also vastly stating the degree of influence the
Speaker 3: caliph has right in fucking India. So this is the
Speaker 3: status quo for a while, Like we're gonna, you know,
Speaker 3: keep propping up the Ottoman Empire because of these reasons
Speaker 3: that are useful for our own empire. But then things
Speaker 3: start to change in eighteen sixty nine, which is when
Speaker 3: the Suez Canal opens in Egypt. One reason that the
Speaker 3: British Empire had needed the Ottomans to remain semi stable
Speaker 3: was that we need them in order to provide us
Speaker 3: with a way to quickly and easily take goods from
Speaker 3: the East and the Europe and vice versa.
Speaker 2: Right, do you say goods and services? Goods and services? Right?
Speaker 3: Speaking of goods and services, you know who else takes
Speaker 3: every product that sponsored on this show travels through the
Speaker 3: Ottoman Empire, you know, including it's extremely expensive. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's ruining the time stream. We have time cup problems
Speaker 3: every fucking week, always trying to bring various weight loss
Speaker 3: pills and gambling apps through the Ottoman Empire. And you know,
Speaker 3: how do Ottomans for the eighteen nineties feel about Chumba Casino.
Speaker 3: They don't love it, Margaret, they don't love Chumpa Casino.
Speaker 3: They're broadly positive about the Trump sneakers though. Anyway, here's
Speaker 3: some ads, So we're back. So yeah, the British, you know,
Speaker 3: get the sus Canal going, and suddenly they don't really
Speaker 3: need the Ottoman Empire to be a stable in order
Speaker 3: to like move goods and services, right, and they, you know,
Speaker 3: they make a shitload of money off the canal, and
Speaker 3: once they're kind of fatted on canal profits, they stop
Speaker 3: really caring about the Sultan and like propping his bullshit up.
Speaker 3: And as a result, the British kind of snooze through.
Speaker 3: Another Russian invasion of Ottoman territory. Now this isn't the
Speaker 3: ottomanive heartland. It's the Balkans, right, which you have to
Speaker 3: remember much of the Balkans, you know, the territory that
Speaker 3: becomes like Yugoslavia during the twenty the later twentieth century
Speaker 3: is Ottoman territory in this period of time. And so
Speaker 3: the Russians invade the Balkans and you know, eighteen eighty
Speaker 3: two or the Russians invade the Balkans, and like, you know,
Speaker 3: the Brits don't do anything. And then in eighteen eighty
Speaker 3: two the British occupy Egypt. Near the end of the century,
Speaker 3: Greece and the Ottomans go to war, and war spreads
Speaker 3: quickly in this connected world. British colonial figures in India
Speaker 3: are shocked and horrified when Indian Muslims start demonstrating in
Speaker 3: support of the Ottoman side of the war, and they
Speaker 3: take this as, oh, you know, the Khalif, their leader
Speaker 3: has called them to action. I think what this actually
Speaker 3: is is that like Muslims in India sympathized with their
Speaker 3: co religionists in a very natural way in a war
Speaker 3: against the West's right. I think that's more accurate than like, ah,
Speaker 3: the Khalif ordered them and they have to follow him.
Speaker 3: I want to quote now from a book called Setting
Speaker 3: the Desert on a Fire by James Barr, and this
Speaker 3: is talking about like European coverage of the war against Greece.
Speaker 3: At the times, Valentine Chirol believed that the Sultan's power
Speaker 3: as khalif gave him a disturbing and disruptive political influence worldwide.
Speaker 3: He and others feared that the Sultan would use his
Speaker 3: position to upset the stability of Britain's Eastern Empire. Now
Speaker 3: this is not how things worse work out. And this
Speaker 3: is probably we know, now probably fair to call this
Speaker 3: a silly and racist assumption. But you know who else
Speaker 3: is silly and racist, Margaret not our sponsors Germans. And
Speaker 3: while the British are like, oh my god, what if
Speaker 3: the Caliph incites a rebellion in India, the Germans are
Speaker 3: also looking and seeing England as a geopolitical enemy and going,
Speaker 3: oh my god, what if we could get the Sultan
Speaker 3: to incite a rebellion in India? Or you know, that
Speaker 3: could really help us with our British people problem. So
Speaker 3: the Germans start increasingly sinking resources into making the Ottomans
Speaker 3: their friends. They send engineers and metal workers to help
Speaker 3: the Sultan build railways, and they send military officers to
Speaker 3: modernize his army.
Speaker 2: And this is you know that if tankies existed, then
Speaker 2: they'd be supporting the Germans because they'd be like, well,
Speaker 2: at least they're against the British.
Speaker 3: Anti imperialist icons, the Kaiser's Germany. Yeah, yeah, there's no
Speaker 3: genocide in Namibia. What are you talking about? No Armenians
Speaker 3: were ever killed by the Turks now anti Western, anti
Speaker 3: imperialist icons, the Turkish Empire.
Speaker 2: I know a bit about how the Germans are going
Speaker 2: to be involved in the Armenian genocide in a lastic Germans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're not gonna get We'll be talking a
Speaker 3: little bit about that, not enough. But this isn't a
Speaker 3: story primarily about that. But that is happening, right. This
Speaker 3: is the situation in the Muslim world. When Te Lawrence
Speaker 3: embarks on his first journey there in June of nineteen
Speaker 3: oh nine, a steamership takes him to the port of
Speaker 3: Jedda in modern days Saudi Arabia now Later, during the
Speaker 3: second landing in Jedda in nineteen sixteen, Lawrence writes about
Speaker 3: the experience of taking this steamership to Jetta, and this
Speaker 3: is such a beautiful passage that I just have to
Speaker 3: read it. When we at last anchored in the outer
Speaker 3: harbor off the White Town, hung between the blazing sky
Speaker 3: and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled
Speaker 3: over the wide lagoon. Then the heat of Arabia came
Speaker 3: out like a drawn sword and struck a speechless.
Speaker 2: He clearly cares about living an esthetic life. Yes, that's
Speaker 2: everything to him, but also, like you were talking about earlier,
Speaker 2: how he still wants I'm sure he's going to fail
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of times, but he wants to do
Speaker 2: what's right in any given situation. Well at the same time, yeah,
Speaker 2: trying to live up a beautiful life regardless of the
Speaker 2: yes cost to his health. And that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. And I can tell you just from
Speaker 3: extensively traveling in this similar region, that description of like
Speaker 3: the heat like a drawn sword striking you in the face,
Speaker 3: I identify with quite a lot like that. Is That
Speaker 3: is how it like, especially that first getting off the
Speaker 3: plane in a rack and stepping outside, for it is
Speaker 3: it does feel like you've been assaulted suddenly. It's like
Speaker 3: a violent experience.
Speaker 2: Is a dry a wet heat? It is a dry heat. Yes.
Speaker 3: From Jetta, he covered more than eleven hundred miles, mostly
Speaker 3: on foot in a ride up for the Guardian Laura
Speaker 3: Feigel describes his journey. Lawrence wandered around Syria clad fastidiously
Speaker 3: in a bespoke suit and hobnailed boots. He've amused the
Speaker 3: natives with his insistence on walking, even when accompanied by
Speaker 3: guides on horseback. He was especially English in his understated
Speaker 3: response to hardship. I've had the delay of four attacks
Speaker 3: of malaria when I had only reckoned on two. He
Speaker 3: complained to his mother, informing her nonchalantly that he had
Speaker 3: been robbed and rather snatched up by a group of
Speaker 3: armed robbers just casually, like nearly died of malaria, got
Speaker 3: beaten by bandits.
Speaker 2: Anyway, how are you doing, mom? That is the one
Speaker 2: the British characteristic that like endurates. It's pretty good. It's
Speaker 2: pretty good. Not everyone should have it, but the keep
Speaker 2: calm and carry on while you're being while you're literally
Speaker 2: the only nache power of fighting the Nazis. Yeah, sometimes
Speaker 2: you just need the like anxious, so stiff upper lip.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's part of why I've spent most of
Speaker 3: my career reporting alongside British journalists. When like you're really
Speaker 3: in the shit, it's very helpful to have a brit
Speaker 3: next to you, they're very good. Yea, yeah, they call
Speaker 3: them a word that sounds like a slur, but it's not.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: His experience entered. His experience of this time where he's
Speaker 3: like nearly dying while walking eleven hundred miles, is completely positive.
Speaker 3: He is just he falls madly in love with the
Speaker 3: local culture, with particularly like these Arabs that he's starting
Speaker 3: to meet as he begins his journey through that portion
Speaker 3: of the Ottoman Empire, and he's particularly taken by their
Speaker 3: treatment of him as a guest. He writes home to
Speaker 3: his father, this is a glorious country for wandering in,
Speaker 3: for hospitality is something more than a name. Setting aside
Speaker 3: the American and English missionaries who take care of me
Speaker 3: in the most fatherly or motherly way, they have all
Speaker 3: so far been as good as they can be. There
Speaker 3: are the common people, each one ready to receive one
Speaker 3: for a night and allow me to share in their meals,
Speaker 3: and without a thought of payment from a traveler on foot.
Speaker 3: It is so pleasant, for they have a very attractive
Speaker 3: kind of native dignity, and there's a you know, there's
Speaker 3: Orientalism going on in that passage. But this is also
Speaker 3: something if you travel in this region of the world
Speaker 3: today you will experience, which is the treatment of guests
Speaker 3: is It's deeper than just Islam. It's something that goes
Speaker 3: back very far in that region of the world, and
Speaker 3: it is a profound experience.
Speaker 2: I don't know how else to.
Speaker 3: Describe it, but like the welcome you are in people's homes,
Speaker 3: people like fighting over hosting you and putting you up
Speaker 3: through the night. Like it's a very unique experience. And
Speaker 3: I'm not surprised he's taken by it. I know exactly
Speaker 3: how he feels here, and there is this feeling of
Speaker 3: belonging that's totally different from like southern hospitality right where
Speaker 3: people will offer you things, but it's kind of rude
Speaker 3: generally to take them. It's more a matter of like,
Speaker 3: like you all, it's almost sometimes a problem for you.
Speaker 3: The degree to which people are offering you meals in
Speaker 3: hospitality because like you have, you have a schedule to keep,
Speaker 3: You've got to get places right.
Speaker 2: And what he says, it goes beyond Islam. I know
Speaker 2: that it's a fundamental concept in Islam is taking.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's like but but it's a fundamental concept in
Speaker 3: Islam because that was present in the cultures of the
Speaker 3: region before Islam existed. Right, I'm not saying like Islam stolen.
Speaker 3: I'm saying that like it is a part of Islam,
Speaker 3: because it's been a part of the culture for.
Speaker 2: Much The people who made Islam already had that going on, right, Right, that's.
Speaker 3: Now Lawrence seems to have been drawn in part to
Speaker 3: the feeling of belonging that he felt here because he'd
Speaker 3: never felt like he belonged at home, in part because
Speaker 3: he's haunted by his status as an illegitimate child, so
Speaker 3: part of the people here everywhere he goes because he
Speaker 3: glues pospet together. Right. He never he doesn't feel like
Speaker 3: he belongs. He feels like a fraud and impostor, he's bullied,
Speaker 3: and then he goes to this place where everyone's extremely
Speaker 3: happy to see him and nice to him, and he
Speaker 3: feels like he has a place to be. Right now,
Speaker 3: there's also imperialist impulses right that are influenced by his
Speaker 3: obsession with the Crusades. Schneider writes, quote, Lawrence began to
Speaker 3: see the Arab world in a new way and would
Speaker 3: soon come to believe that he could move and bind
Speaker 3: it to his will, that his Crusader musings were more
Speaker 3: than an adolescent fantasy. We're starting to see some of
Speaker 3: like the darker side growing as he begins to understand,
Speaker 3: he also starts to think about how I can manipulate
Speaker 3: and change things here. So Lawrence has this first trip
Speaker 3: and he has a wonderful time. He returns home with
Speaker 3: his documentation of these different like structures he's seen from
Speaker 3: the Crusades, and he graduates from Oxford. Right. He makes
Speaker 3: several more trips to France to work for the Ashmolean Museum,
Speaker 3: but he remains obsessed with the East. Right, and in
Speaker 3: late nineteen ten, he succeeds in setting up an apprenticeship
Speaker 3: and an archaeological dig in Turkey. To prepare, he traveled
Speaker 3: to Beroot that Christmas and spent two months in Lebanon
Speaker 3: being tutored in Arabic. Schneider writes that sixty years later,
Speaker 3: his Arabic teacher recalled him as someone who quote lived
Speaker 3: rather in the spirit than in the body. Right, that's
Speaker 3: her description of Lawrence from meeting him. Okay, Now, many
Speaker 3: descriptions of Lawrence paint this picture of him as almost
Speaker 3: a monk, this severe aesthetic philosopher type I think some
Speaker 3: of that is conscious because he admires these monks who
Speaker 3: are like a major part of the transmission of the
Speaker 3: medieval history. That is such an obsession to him. Right.
Speaker 3: That said, he is not one of these guys who's
Speaker 3: like this that almost gives you this picture of him
Speaker 3: as someone who's like unknown and unknowable. That's not him
Speaker 3: at all. In fact, he is incredibly popular with the
Speaker 3: local Arab diggers that he meets in. You know, some
Speaker 3: are Arabs, some are Turks, but like this is like
Speaker 3: in a rural region of Anatolia, right, and a lot
Speaker 3: of these guys, these very like dirt poor diggers, really
Speaker 3: identify with Lawrence because he's not like the other europe
Speaker 3: and that he doesn't just sit around and wait for
Speaker 3: other people to do work for him. He digs as
Speaker 3: hard as anyone else on the team.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: He's actually useful and he's committed to not just like
Speaker 3: sitting around while other people do shit. Snyder writes, quote.
Speaker 3: A typical example of this aspect of Lawrence's leadership occurred
Speaker 3: in June Today. I cured a man of compound scorpion
Speaker 3: bite by a few drops of ammonia. For that, I
Speaker 3: have a fame above Thompson's as hakim doctor and as
Speaker 3: a magician who can conjure devils into water. His role
Speaker 3: as camp position would be put to good use, for
Speaker 3: in June of nineteen twelve, a severe outbreak of cholera
Speaker 3: struck the Aleppo area, and saw Lawrence helping the local
Speaker 3: population deal with the problem through the remainder of the summer.
Speaker 3: Lawrence also adopted local garb, dressing in a Kurdish belt
Speaker 3: and attiring himself like the diggers he'd gotten to know.
Speaker 3: He found their clothing much more practical than what he
Speaker 3: bought from Oxford, and he wrote of his Western colleagues,
Speaker 3: the foreigners came out here always to teach, whereas they
Speaker 3: had much better to learn. You can see why this
Speaker 3: guy's well liked, you know now. In his books Setting
Speaker 3: the Desert on Fire, Barr also gives a much again,
Speaker 3: if you want a little bit less of the like
Speaker 3: you know, agent of history moving nobly through time picture,
Speaker 3: here's a much more fun account of Lawrence's behavior at
Speaker 3: this time. He injected these excavations with an excitement not
Speaker 3: usually associated with the world of archaeology by firing his
Speaker 3: pistol in the air. Whatever an interesting find was unearthed.
Speaker 3: This is also what makes him popular. He loves shooting
Speaker 3: his gun in the air whenever he's.
Speaker 2: In a good mood. In honorary American, honorary American.
Speaker 3: Yeah you have, I am declaring you with citizen of
Speaker 3: the State of Texas, Lawrence. Your tin gallon hat is
Speaker 3: in the mail. Now. The digging season is not a
Speaker 3: year round thing, yet Lawrence could always be counted to
Speaker 3: hang around long after all the other foreigners had left.
Speaker 3: He just doesn't want to leave when the digging is done.
Speaker 3: One of his English colleagues later wrote, I never quite
Speaker 3: fathomed why Lawrence was still at Carkemish when the digs
Speaker 3: were closed down, but I gathered that it was partly
Speaker 3: from choice and partly from economy. He used to spend
Speaker 3: his time wandering around in Arab dress, sometimes for days
Speaker 3: at a time, storing his phenomenal memory with scraps of
Speaker 3: local knowledge, which came in very useful later on. When
Speaker 3: he was not doing this, he was trying to puzzle
Speaker 3: out the Hittite inscriptions or target shooting with a long
Speaker 3: mouser pistol. I amused myself by competing with him at
Speaker 3: both of these games.
Speaker 2: So he's just a fun dude.
Speaker 3: He likes shooting, he likes puzzling out Hittite inscriptions, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he wants to dress like the locals and
Speaker 2: he wants to see where he's because when he's walking
Speaker 2: around in his like suit and hobnail shoes and the desert,
Speaker 2: you're like, yeah, oh man, he's like one of those
Speaker 2: like young Republican kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, he just didn't know a better way. And
Speaker 3: like a big part of it is like it's just
Speaker 3: much more reasonable to be dressed that way in the
Speaker 3: in this part of the world like he is.
Speaker 2: He is car chemist.
Speaker 3: He's like right on the border of a you know,
Speaker 3: modern day Turkey, like the far southern Turkey and Syria. Right,
Speaker 3: So this is it's not far from like some of
Speaker 3: the area. It's not it's like not far from well
Speaker 3: actually no, sorry it is, but like yeah, it's far
Speaker 3: from Haseka, but like yeah, he so he's right in
Speaker 3: you know, this is like the Turks would say, part
Speaker 3: of the Turkish heartland, but this is like the Arab world,
Speaker 3: the Kurdish world. It's kind of like right in the
Speaker 3: middle of all of that, and it's just not a
Speaker 3: reasonable place to wear a three piece suit all summer.
Speaker 3: The garb that the locals wear as much more comfortable,
Speaker 3: especially if you're digging all day.
Speaker 2: It's compared to the thing that was developed on a
Speaker 2: terrible island where the sun never want an empire where
Speaker 2: the sun never sets is yeah, live on an island
Speaker 2: where it doesn't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So Lawrence was to spend the next three
Speaker 3: years of his life in Turkey as much as possible.
Speaker 3: This was, by every credible account, the happiest period of
Speaker 3: his life. And it is also where we get the
Speaker 3: first claims that he was a bastard, right specifically the
Speaker 3: claim that he was a pedophile or some sort of groomer.
Speaker 3: Right now, I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't
Speaker 3: agree with this interpretation, but I'm I'm gonna make the
Speaker 3: case for it. I'm going to explain to you why
Speaker 3: people talk about this. So the gist of it is
Speaker 3: that while Lawrence was participating in this dig a fourteen
Speaker 3: year old boy named Salim Ahmed was hired on as
Speaker 3: a donkey boy. In the parlance of the times, this
Speaker 3: means he helped lead donkey trains of supplies to the diggers. Salim,
Speaker 3: nicknamed Dahum or the little dark One by his fellows,
Speaker 3: became fast friends with Lawrence. We don't know precisely why,
Speaker 3: but their bond deepened when Lawrence caught dysentery later that year,
Speaker 3: and Dome cared for him until he got better. The
Speaker 3: two traveled to Aleppo together, and Lawrence began promoting his
Speaker 3: young friend to higher positions and ultimately made Dahom his assistant.
Speaker 3: While on the dig, the two lived in the same
Speaker 3: house and seemed to take particular place you're in wearing
Speaker 3: each other's clothes. This is something that everyone will say
Speaker 3: about them, is like they would exchange outfits and dressed
Speaker 3: like each other. They have pictures taken where they're dressed
Speaker 3: in identical outfits, like dressed as each other, and by
Speaker 3: all accounts they are inseparable. Right and again, this is like,
Speaker 3: I think he's fourteen, you know, to sixteen during the
Speaker 3: period where they're spending most of their time together, and
Speaker 3: Lawrence is in his twenties, so this is potentially very problematic,
Speaker 3: right Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson described Lawrence as having a
Speaker 3: quote almost fatherly concern for the boy. One of his
Speaker 3: colleagues at the dig. Leonard Woolley went much further after
Speaker 3: Lawrence became famous. He made public allegations that Lawrence had
Speaker 3: convinced quote Domed to live with him and got him
Speaker 3: to pose as a model for a queer crouching figure,
Speaker 3: which he carved in the soft local limestone. To make
Speaker 3: an image was bad enough in this way, but to
Speaker 3: portray a naked figure was proof to them the local
Speaker 3: arabs of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence
Speaker 3: was widely spread and firmly believed. So Willie's allegation is
Speaker 3: that these two were homosexual lovers and like the locals
Speaker 3: found out about it because he was carving an image
Speaker 3: of Dome in local naked and local limestone. Now again,
Speaker 3: Dome would have been fifteen or sixteen, and at the
Speaker 3: time that is not the same as fifteen or sixteen today. Again,
Speaker 3: and like Germany, you're an adult at fourteen. But I
Speaker 3: donuld say that to mitigate potential pedophilia, just to say
Speaker 3: like that is why his countrymen who criticized him for
Speaker 3: who like he was homosexual, they're not calling him pedophile
Speaker 3: because that's not how they would have seen this, right,
Speaker 3: they would have seen this as a gay relationship. That's
Speaker 3: not how we see it. I don't think we're wrong
Speaker 3: in seeing it differently. But he is not written about
Speaker 3: by people who criticize him as his time as a pedophile.
Speaker 3: He's written about as a homosexual, which is a severe
Speaker 3: criminal offense in the UK at the time. Right, if
Speaker 3: he had been convicted of this, he would have gone
Speaker 3: to prison.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting is because for centuries, yeah, gay men
Speaker 2: and Britain would go to the Ottoman Empire because it
Speaker 2: was like more accepted to be gay there and just
Speaker 2: a friendlier place. But obviously I think that started to
Speaker 2: fade around this time. Actually I've heard because of Western influence,
Speaker 2: but I'm not I've been more certain about things.
Speaker 3: It's a bit more. It's too complicated for us to
Speaker 3: get into and detail. But one aspect of this that
Speaker 3: I think was an aspect of why it was friendlier
Speaker 3: in the autom An Empire, and it's an aspect of
Speaker 3: how everyone looks at it and how like Lawrence is famous,
Speaker 3: he's not homophobic, right, he has friends who are gay
Speaker 3: that he knows are gay, and he does not seem
Speaker 3: to have any issue with this. But also I don't
Speaker 3: know that he would have I don't think he had
Speaker 3: any kind of sexual relationship with Doom to like skip
Speaker 3: ahead here. But I don't know that he would have
Speaker 3: felt that was wrong, because he would have looked at
Speaker 3: it in the way that like he saw and in
Speaker 3: the way like ancient Greeks had these relationships between older
Speaker 3: men and their younger wards. Right, that is probably how
Speaker 3: he would have seen it, right, That.
Speaker 2: Makes sense to me.
Speaker 3: That's not what I think is going on here. Now.
Speaker 3: There are allegations later in his career from adult colleagues
Speaker 3: in the army who claimed that Lawrence asked them to
Speaker 3: whip him, right, and so these have kind of been
Speaker 3: merged in the public mind with some of these rumors
Speaker 3: that he and Doom had a sexual relationship. And a
Speaker 3: good example of how this comes down in casual.
Speaker 2: History is a.
Speaker 3: Quote from a very bad listical I found called great
Speaker 3: People who were also perverts, which I found on this
Speaker 3: terrible shitty we clickbait website called backloll.
Speaker 2: The artic going to make a crack com joke. But no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: No no, I don't know. Maybe they stole this from us,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Lawrence was very famous for playing Lawrence
Speaker 3: of Arabia pictured here a great actor. Not many know
Speaker 3: that he was also a great archaeologist. I think they're
Speaker 3: confusing him with Peter O'Toole here, so I think we
Speaker 3: would have caught that. At Cracked, it was said that
Speaker 3: Lawrence didn't go much for relationships at all, then suddenly
Speaker 3: he fell in love with a young boy who was underage.
Speaker 3: He also loved to be whipped hard on his backside,
Speaker 3: so definitely had strong leanings towards masochism. A pedophile at
Speaker 3: a masochist is a far cry from the over glamorized,
Speaker 3: glamorized image people have him as a great actor. Do
Speaker 3: you not know Lawrence was a real prayer. He's not
Speaker 3: Peter O'Toole. I don't think Peter O'Toole was a pedophile,
Speaker 3: what like? Okay, Anyway, after that, this is a separate person.
Speaker 3: You have some serious misconceptions about the history here.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: A different article I found on a better website, Cleohistory,
Speaker 3: a dot of work, made the equally confusing decision to
Speaker 3: ignore the particulars of Dohome's age and depict his relationship
Speaker 3: with Lawrence as more of a thwarted gay love affair.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: While at Carchemish, he formed a particularly close bond with
Speaker 3: a handsome young Arab water boy, whom Lawrence once took
Speaker 3: on a long visit to Oxford. However, given the reticences
Speaker 3: of the time, it seems impossible to finally get a
Speaker 3: clear picture of Lawrence's romantic life.
Speaker 2: Now I'm gonna.
Speaker 3: Skip to the end here and say there's no evidence
Speaker 3: that Lawrence had sex with Dahoum, or that he even
Speaker 3: wanted to. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that
Speaker 3: Lawrence ever chose to engage in sexual activity with any
Speaker 3: person over the course of his entire life. Anthony Satin writes,
Speaker 3: Lawrence said he never had a sexual relationship, and most
Speaker 3: people who knew him found that credible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if he's friends with gay folks, he would have
Speaker 2: said it. If he was like nah, yes, sleeping boys.
Speaker 3: And he does. He describes himself in a letter to
Speaker 3: a friend of his who was gay and who he
Speaker 3: knew was gay, as this is Lawrence describing himself funnily
Speaker 3: made up sexually. And from the context we can see
Speaker 3: two things. He was aware of homosexuality and not judgmental
Speaker 3: of it, and he did not consider himself gay or straight,
Speaker 3: and I think probably the best term that fits for
Speaker 3: him is a sexual Right now, this is not an
Speaker 3: orientation that is well understood even today, and we shouldn't
Speaker 3: assume that he would have talked about his sexuality the
Speaker 3: way modern day ace people talk about it, right, Right,
Speaker 3: this is nineteen eleven, and in any sexuality is pretty
Speaker 3: much non existent in the public consciousness, right, he probably
Speaker 3: would have thought of his own sexuality more like he
Speaker 3: thinks of like a monk, someone who has taken a
Speaker 3: vow of celibacy, totally right, although he doesn't write about
Speaker 3: having any particular sexual desires, and in fact, I m Forster,
Speaker 3: the gay friend that he wrote to about his own sexuality,
Speaker 3: seems to have interpreted Lawrence's feelings towards Dahome as an
Speaker 3: unconsummated love affair. But I think that's Forster kind of
Speaker 3: pushing some of his own sexuality onto Lawrence.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Lawrence describes himself as kind of celibate. He writes repeatedly
Speaker 3: about his love for Dome, but in a manner more
Speaker 3: complicated than just like fatherly affection, but also not in
Speaker 3: a way that sounds like lust to me. And here's
Speaker 3: Satin again. Ten years later, when Lawrence referred to his
Speaker 3: friendship with Doome, he talked of it as one in
Speaker 3: which there was such intimacy and mutual understanding that they
Speaker 3: had said all two people could say to each other.
Speaker 3: This freed them to work or rest together for hours
Speaker 3: without speaking. Experienced that sense of calm and trust with
Speaker 3: very few people in his life. It was not obvious
Speaker 3: that one of them would be a donkey boy from Jerablas.
Speaker 3: In the summer of nineteen thirteen, the two of them
Speaker 3: spent most days and evenings together working at the dig,
Speaker 3: swimming in the euphrates, cleaning and drawing, photographing and cataloging
Speaker 3: the finds in the courtyard or a large sitting room
Speaker 3: of the expedition house, even while Lawrence was busy writing
Speaker 3: of his adventures in Seven Pillars of Islam. And you
Speaker 3: know by this characterization, Yeah, they were two people who
Speaker 3: had a profound bond, but not a sexual one. And like,
Speaker 3: why did he carve that sculpture? Well, because he liked sculptures, right,
Speaker 3: and he was raised on sculptures of the naked human
Speaker 3: form that he didn't see as sexual. Because this is
Speaker 3: not a guy who particularly had any sexual feeling probably right.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because I was talking to my sister about
Speaker 2: this one time, and we were talking about the whole
Speaker 2: historically close friends thing and how like, you know, we
Speaker 2: kind of we go back in time and say, like, oh,
Speaker 2: all of these women were lesbians, like all the ones
Speaker 2: who just had historically close friends that they lived with
Speaker 2: a roommates. And it's hard because we just actually don't
Speaker 2: know in most circumstances, like sometimes we do we have
Speaker 2: like professions of sexual love between the two, but like
Speaker 2: sometimes historically close friends were just historically close friends in
Speaker 2: a way that also doesn't map to any current understanding
Speaker 2: of sexuality that we know we operate with today.
Speaker 3: And all I can say is, you know, for one thing,
Speaker 3: that colleague who initially made the allegations that Lawrence was
Speaker 3: gay later in life came to be like, actually, I
Speaker 3: think it's probably likely that he never had any kind
Speaker 3: of sexual feelings towards Dahom, and Lawrence in his own
Speaker 3: letters to his friends with whom he could have been
Speaker 3: open if he had what they would have seen as
Speaker 3: a homosexual affair, was like, I've never had sex, and
Speaker 3: I've never really wanted to. And that's how Lawrence talks
Speaker 3: about it right now. Lawrence is not a perfectly reliable narrator,
Speaker 3: but I just don't see any reason he would have
Speaker 3: lied about this. I think he was probably if we're
Speaker 3: characterizing him today, he's probably a sexual right And I
Speaker 3: want to close with a quote by Satin about Lawrence
Speaker 3: and Dome. It is impossible to know what Doom thought
Speaker 3: of these changes to his life. He was obviously flattered
Speaker 3: that Lawrence was taking an interest in him well. The
Speaker 3: extra money and new status helped set him apart in
Speaker 3: the village. A range of possibilities was opening through his
Speaker 3: growing ability to read and write Arabic. But only occasionally
Speaker 3: can we hear Doom's voice with any clarity. One moment
Speaker 3: was at ibin Wardani, but the most persuasive was his
Speaker 3: answer to Miss Farida's question in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 3: twelve of why he loved Lawrence. He did so, he replied,
Speaker 3: because Lawrence was brother, friend and leader, because he could
Speaker 3: do things better than them, because he was courageous, playful, humorous,
Speaker 3: and perhaps more important to them, because they knew he
Speaker 3: cared for them. And I think that that if you're
Speaker 3: looking for like is he apanas well, that's not what
Speaker 3: Doom says. Doom says he was like a brother, and
Speaker 3: I think that's probably a better much. That's probably the
Speaker 3: right way to look at this relationship hip.
Speaker 2: Wow, Okay, anyway, so far, the only way in which
Speaker 2: he's a bastard is in a literal sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a bastard literally a little bit of he
Speaker 3: does some orientalizing right in. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: but like not in a way that would earn him
Speaker 3: an episode here. He's probably not a pedophile kind of
Speaker 3: maybe an ace icon Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I had always my dad had always told me when
Speaker 3: we would watch the movie together, that he had been gay,
Speaker 3: and I've come to find that, like there's not really
Speaker 3: any evidence for that. Like he was cool with gay people,
Speaker 3: but like there's not really any evidence that he was gay.
Speaker 2: Do you think that was your dad like trying to
Speaker 2: be chill about a gay person, because he sounds like
Speaker 2: your dad liked Lawrence Ville.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it may have been. It was also just like
Speaker 3: that had that was the understanding, the common understanding, and
Speaker 3: I think that still is. I think most people would
Speaker 3: still say, oh, he was gay, right, Like I think
Speaker 3: that is still how most people think of this, I
Speaker 3: mean in a weird way.
Speaker 2: Also, because I've been reading a whole bunch recently about
Speaker 2: some of the early Protestant ideas around sexuality and and
Speaker 2: not making kids and not getting married. Is all sort
Speaker 2: of equally gay, yeah, to a certain degree. So like
Speaker 2: monks and priests were sort of gay to the Protestants
Speaker 2: because they like weren't having weren't getting married and having kids. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, And so I could see I'm always saying this,
Speaker 2: there's a version of you know, queerness whatever, that there's
Speaker 2: a reason that Ace is in the queer umbrella now,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely? All right, Well, so, uh that's it. That's
Speaker 3: the episode.
Speaker 2: All right, we did it, Joe mag Pie. Do you
Speaker 2: have anything you want to plug? Well, if you like
Speaker 2: history about complicated people who mostly aren't bad, then I
Speaker 2: have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: which is on this little known network called cool Zone Media,
Speaker 2: and you can listen to it. And it's probably too
Speaker 2: late to catch me on tour when you're listening to this,
Speaker 2: but maybe maybe it's not. Maybe I'll be on a
Speaker 2: different tour by the time you hear this, And which case,
Speaker 2: you can find me there. But just go listen to
Speaker 2: the cool people did cool stuff.
Speaker 3: Listen to cool people who did cool stuff, and you know, uh,
Speaker 3: launch an insurgent war I don't care against two do
Speaker 3: it somewhere. You know.
Speaker 2: This is going to sound really weird depending on what
Speaker 2: happens next week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's my advice to you, no matter where you
Speaker 3: are in the world, go start some shit you know
Speaker 3: or don't or don't legally don't.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
Speaker 1: and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 1: at Behind the Bastards