Part Two: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy to continue our series on Lawrence of Arabia. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Robert Evans?

  What's murdering my everyone's? I'm Robert Evans and right now I'm thinking about murdering everyone.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Why?

• 0:11Robert Evans?

  Because yesterday I got stuck in traffic for Sophie six minutes.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Oh, insufferable.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  You drive a giant truck, you shouldn't have to get stuck in traffic.

• 0:20Robert Evans?

  That's exactly what I thought, but every time you drive it over other people, suddenly there's all sorts of crimes that are being committed.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Well.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  By who?

• 0:28Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. Well, by me.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  By people in your way?

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  I did have a lady back into me yesterday and hit my front end, but like it did no damage. Oh my God, I felt so bad. She was like sobbing and I was like, look ma'am, I'm not gonna call the cops. Like your back bumper is a little cracked, but like if you don't want to report this to insurance, I don't give a fuck.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Also because the insurance will take her side if she decided it was your fault. There's, even though she backed into you.

• 0:58Robert Evans?

  I mean, yeah, I don't think there was much of a chance of that. Like I was 20 feet back. She just pulled straight out of a parking space. Like I saw her backing up. I gave her room. She just, she just, just straight into me. Like, it was like, what lady, you had a lot of chances to recognize that you were making a mistake here. But I don't know, I see somebody cry. Like I'm not gonna, one of my favorite things is whenever you see someone get upset because they've hit you and you get to be like, hey, I'm not calling, calling anybody over this. Oh, it's such a good feeling.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  But one time someone rear ended me and I was like, look, I'm not calling everyone over like a $20 sensor in the back of my terrible car. And then the kid, it was a teenager, her mom wrote me and was like, great, can I get you to sign something saying that you will not like sue or ask for money later? And I was like, no, if there's paperwork involved, it goes through my.

• 1:55Robert Evans?

  No, that's a real different situation, ma'am.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  You want something signed, it's coming from my insurance company.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Why is, why is everybody so unchill lately? Just calm down.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Everyone's lost their mind.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Calm down.

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  You know who didn't lose their mind?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Unlike in the future when you are listening to this, because I think America's about to be really chill starting next week.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  We are, we are electing a new president who instead of Kamala or Trump, I think is going to be a being of pure light, uh, who is incapable of sin. So it's Angerson, the president's my dog? I'm sure in like two years, we will have murdered them. Well, no. Because a being of pure light will not get very far as a president in this country.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  We all get to wear those hats that say, be thou not afraid.

• 2:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, no, that part's going to be great. Uh, that's the new MAGA is be thou not afraid.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  We're so screwed.

• 2:52Robert Evans?

  Are you MAGA? No, I'm butna. Uh, yeah.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Games on a break? Instead of doom scrolling, try rips on Underdog. Rip real player cards worth real money right there in the app. It's instant cash in the palm of your hand. Buy a digital pack, rip it open on your phone and reveal a real physical card. Football, basketball, Pokemon, yes, Pokemon and more. The best part? Packs start at just $5. And if you pull something you don't want to let go of just yet, have it shipped straight to your door. Want the cash? Sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value. No listing, no negotiating, no stranger asking if you'll trade it for a used jet ski, even though jet skis are super sick. Best part? There are some serious grails in the

• 3:45Speaker 04

  mix with maximum card values reaching up to $125,000 depending on your pack tier. You can also check the live odds and see what you could pull before you rip and what other cards are being pulled by fans. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 4:12Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those showstopping moments will be answered in the all new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 5:15Robert Evans?

  Anyway, let's talk about Lawrence of Arabia.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:18Robert Evans?

  Ol, ol, t, e.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Okay, but speaking of angels and Lawrence of Arabia, is he particularly religious?

• 5:27Robert Evans?

  Not as an adult. As a kid, he is. As an adult, he's just kind of like vaguely spiritual, but not like particularly religious. I think he's just kind of too much of a thinker to be particularly devout.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  And it makes some good sense when you're traveling around in a part of the world that has a different religion than what you were raised in.

• 5:48Robert Evans?

  He very clearly is not someone who's like, well, all these people are going to hell, right? He does not believe that at all. Yeah.

• 5:56Robert Evans?

  Through Daum and his experience traveling the Arab and Kurdish regions of the world, Lawrence began to develop an understanding of the brutality of the Ottoman Empire as well as its incompetence. Now, during the years leading up to the big dub dub Uno, there was a general, that's World War I for all of you people who hate me every time I do this bit, there was a general sense among Arabs that the Turks were at least their best bet at protection from Western imperialism, right? That like, well, we don't really like being ruled by the Ottomans, but we see what you Westerners are doing to the rest of the world, and we don't want that either. At least these people are Muslim, right? The British had occupied Egypt in 1882 and had fought a very bloody war there against an enemy who was seen in the West not dissimilarly from how ISIS was depicted in the 21st century.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  So there's a lot of anger towards the West. In 1908, just before Lawrence began his explorations, the young Turks had taken the reins of the Ottoman government. They'd turned the Caliph into a figurehead and Ignited a period of conflict over who would rule the dying empire. The Turk, the young Turks were comparatively secular. They were Western aligned and this amped up the internal imperialism in the Ottoman Empire substantially. Because that is not how most of the people in these like Arab and Kurdish and other regions of the empire really are. The young Turks created the Committee of Union and Progress to try and spread some of their sexy new ideas among the people they ruled. And the most significant idea they wanted to push was called Pan-Turanism.

• 7:25Robert Evans?

  And this is key to understanding Tayyip Resip Erdogan and the current Turkish government. It's genocide against the Kurds in Syria and against in southern Turkey. This is a very, Pan-Turanism is a very important imperialist concept.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Is this the one that runs all the way up to like Finland?

• 7:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah, well, let's, let me just explain.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I'm so sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

• 7:48Robert Evans?

  This is the Turkic version of the Pan-Germanic racial theories that would spread after World War One. Dr. Cave Farokh, an expert on ancient Iran, describes Pan-Turanism as "an ideology that aims at creating a Turkic superstate stretching from the Balkans in Europe eastwards across Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, up to and including Northwest China." Now you will recognize if you know much about the world that most of those areas are not Turkish. Iran, not Turkish. Northwest China, very much not Turkish, you know? Central Asia, not really Turkish. The Balkans, not Turkish.

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  Turkish influence in some of those places, of course, you know, go to Sarajevo, you'll see that, but not Turks. Now, this very much a historical belief is justified by the claim "that all the real indigenous peoples of those regions speak Turkish, or at least in their natural state spoke Turkish, and thus should belong to the same state." Quote, "Hungarian Pan-Turanianist activists even go further. They have proposed that the entire Eurasian landmass between Hungary and Norway and Europe to Japan and Korea was once an empire known as Turania. Apart from non-scholastic websites, no linguist and, uh, no linguistic anthropological and archaeological evidence for such an empire exists.

• 9:13Robert Evans?

  Pan-Turanian racialists and historians would beg to differ. They are impervious to logical explanations, even in the face of hard evidence." I love this shit. Everything was Turks.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:25Robert Evans?

  In the ancient past, it was all Turks, all the way down. I just love that shit. What a bat shit like, no, everything wasn't Turkish. I'm sorry. It wasn't. That's like, that's like, everything was fucking, that's like the Germans being like, our, you know, like, the root of our, the Aryan race is these guys living in Nepal, you know? And, and, and also the same as like, our dreams of, you know, rebreeding this like, Aryan perfect race. I mean, they are Aryans in Nepal, but that's not what Aryan means, you know? So this belief forms the core of a lot of current fascist theory in Turkey and underpins, for example, the genocidal acts of the Turkish state towards Kurdish rebels in the south and across the border in Rojava.

• 10:10Robert Evans?

  Now, all this is a lot less settled in Lawrence's day. It's just kind of gearing up, but he is watching the early stages of this thing that's going to end in genocide, and he recognizes this has a bad end, right? Anything, anything like this is going to not end well.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:26Robert Evans?

  And as the young Turks, one of the ways in which they push these Panteranian ideas is by disseminating anti-Arab propaganda. They are arguing at this point in time that like, instead of, you know, Arabs existing in all these regions, like, all of them, all of these different peoples are descendants of like, Genghis Khan, who is the progenitor of the nation. This pisses people off, and there are counter-revolutions starting in 1909, the year before Lawrence goes on his first dig. Now, that revolution had been sparked by army officers and angry students at a religious school, but the crackdown afterwards bred hatred among locals of Armenian Christians, who they saw as supporting the hated Young Turk government.

• 11:09Robert Evans?

  Thirty thousand of these Christians were butchered in massacres that would prove an ugly prelude to the looming genocide. Lawrence arrived in the wake of all this chaos, and while he was living in Ottoman territory in 1911, Italy invaded and conquered Libya. All of this provoked a surge in Arab nationalism, which we should rightly see as not disconnected from the swells of nationalism across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and elsewhere in Europe. There's a direct line between this Arab revolt that's going to brew and like Serbian nationalism, right? These are all part of like a broader cultural movement around the world. Now, there are two different, but not entirely contradictory explanations for what motivated Lawrence ultimately

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  to support an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. The most sympathetic reason, and the one that paints him in the best light, is related to his relationship with Daum. Lawrence's friend later in life, Ian Forster, argues that Lawrence was intimate and passionately devoted to Daum, although they never consummated their relationship, and given Lawrence died a virgin, he likely had no idea to do so. Satin, whose biography of young Lawrence gives the best texture on the man's life, describes the relationship as something intense but fundamentally unknowable to people reading today. However, he cites with clear textual evidence that however we define this relationship, it inspired Lawrence's actions during World War I. In 1919, Lawrence admitted

• 12:35Robert Evans?

  in a letter to a friend that he had joined the Arab revolt because "I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present." And that is both profoundly orientalist and also so romantic. I'm going to free your people because like, I like you.

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  Like, that's such, not even romantic. That's so, because like, I don't think this was a romantic relationship. That's so sweet.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  But it's like, I also love, okay, it reminds me a little bit about how, okay, so Sam and Frodo, because I have to bring Lord of the Rings into this somehow. Sam and Frodo have a relationship that, when Tolkien talks about, like Tolkien talks about it, and it's like, it's the relationship between brothers in arms and in war, right? And it's the kind of relationship that now that like heterosexuality and homosexuality are much more like defined, doesn't translate to anything. Like, the modern world has no...

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Way of understanding this relationship you're describing.

• 13:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  It's just interesting because romantic is probably the closest word.

• 13:41Robert Evans?

  But there's.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Has connotations that aren't meant.

• 13:44Robert Evans?

  That aren't meant and that like make this seem like for one thing is something like much more problematic than I think it was.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:50Robert Evans?

  And man, it is just like, yeah, the whole like, I like this guy so much. I am going to like free his people from imperial bondage. Like personally is is pretty, pretty cool.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  With no background as a soldier, as far as I can tell.

• 14:07Robert Evans?

  With no military background at this point, just the experience of like making chain mail and learning how to sword fight with his friends.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  The SCA is coming to the rescue.

• 14:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, in a more artful bit of writing, Lawrence, this is, I want to quote from a poem that Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Islam, which Satine argues is a poem that he is. He doesn't explicitly say this is a poem about Daum, but Satine argues this is a poem written for Daum after Daum's death. Quote, "I love you. I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars."

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 14:44Robert Evans?

  Jesus. That's a line. That's bars right there.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  That is beyond romance. It's like pale.

• 14:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Robert Evans?

  I wrote my will across the sky in stars. He's just a good writer, you know? Yeah. So in this conception, if we take this as the reason why Lawrence ultimately backed the Arab revolt, and I will, I'll tell you right now, it can't be all of why, right?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  There are less romantic reasons that his country, Great Britain, gets involved. You know, obviously they're not doing it because some random British dude liked an Arab kid, you know? As I noted last episode, the Germans had started making inroads with the Ottomans after the British pulled back their support of the Sultan. Zik Kaiser, who had thrown away Germany's alliance with Russia because he was a dumb shit, needed the Ottomans because once he's like, fuck you, Russia. He also realizes like, oh my God, there's no one watching our ass, right? So we kind of have to have the Ottomans now, right? And he also, the Kaiser has convinced himself that, well, if I get the Sultan in my back pocket, if we ever have a big fight with Great Britain, I can incite a jihad against the British Empire in India, and that'll solve all my British people problems.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally, because Muslims are definitely in power in India and always have been.

• 15:58Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, that is a clear fact that you know. I mean, if you're the Kaiser, I guess I'm just kind of proud he knows enough about India to know there are Muslims there.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  That's more knowledge than I would have credited Kaiser Wilhelm with having.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:12Robert Evans?

  Now, a further complication here was the recent construction of the Hijaz Railway, which connected the Arab Peninsula to the rest of modern day Saudi Arabia. This is a railway that goes from like, you know, the Ottoman heartland and the Arab world, all the way down through what is modern day Saudi Arabia, to like Oman and Yemen, I think, right? Like, that's the Hijaz, is this massive desert peninsula, right? And this is, you know, the Ottomans, once that Great Britain had gotten the Suez Canal going, the Ottomans had become dependent on Great Britain to move goods to a lot of parts of the world. And this railway was not only supposed to connect a lot of these backwaters of the empire, these tiny little off-the-map places that were really completely separate from the rest of the world,

• 16:57Robert Evans?

  it was also supposed to be this like economic lifeline to the empire that reduced their dependence on Great Britain. The railway was so crucial, not just to the Ottomans, but in a lot of eyes to Islam, right? That it had been funded by donations from Muslims all over the world, including a huge number of Indian Muslims. And the fact that so many Indian Muslims had donated to fund the Hijaz Railway was seen by a lot of like British observers as evidence that like, oh, we really do need to be worried that the Caliph could spark a rebellion, right? Now, this ties back to Lawrence, because during the years he was digging, a realization had spread among the brass back home in England that we might, you know, there's, it's becoming increasingly likely that we're going to have to scrap with the Germans.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  And if that's the case, we probably have to have a plan to deal with the Turks. Now, Lord Kitchener, who was like the king shit of the British military, you know, The period leading up to and the early stages of World War I is the guy, the man in power in the British military establishment, who is first like, hey, I am backing, like, I am officially backing that we want to incite an air. We're looking into the possibility of inciting an Arab rebellion in Syria, right? And supporting it enough to create a friendly state that will fracture Ottoman power, right? Kitchener is like, he's not the guy who originates the idea, but he's the first guy in power who's like, I think we should explore this as a potential official like policy move, right?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Is this like, is this the first time? Because this is, this is like the US's playbook, right? Is you back an uprising in order to create a friendly state to the US? Is this like, are there previous examples?

• 18:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, yes, from the British, right? I don't think the US is doing much of this. I mean, it's done, you know, you could look into some aspects of our history, but like, we get it either way from the Brits, right? They do this in Africa, they do this all over the place.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  So it's an existing playbook?

• 18:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It is definitely an existing playbook, right? This is always how the British Empire's playbook is always, you know, although it's usually a bit different because like this is we are trying to disrupt an enemy by doing this. Usually it's more, we have this area we control that we are not native to, and we're going to find a warrior people and we're going to both back them, but also kind of incite conflicts between them and other peoples in order to take the pressure off of us, right? But you can see how like that playbook, you can, you can translate that directly to what's being done here with the Ottomans, right?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Well, everyone likes doing that. The Tsar did that with the Cossacks.

• 19:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, it's a very old playbook, right?

• 19:35Robert Evans?

  So in September of 1913, the coming war between European powers was both something that like, everyone knew it was happening, right? That there was some sort of general European conflict probably, and also nobody really expected it to happen, right? Not when it happened, right? It's one of those things where it's like, well, this will happen one day, but probably not tomorrow, until eventually tomorrow comes, right?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I hope this is impression for when this episode comes out.

• 19:59Robert Evans?

  Impression for any number of things now. Kitchener being a bit smarter than a lot of people in the British Empire is not just like, well, we'll probably have a war one of these days, but not tomorrow. Kitchener's like, well, he's probably ready. Like, if we're going to wind up fighting the Germans and the Ottomans, we probably have a plan for how to like incite this rebellion that might get the Ottomans, you know, off of our fucking backs. So he sends operatives to Palestine to gather information on Ottoman military facilities there. Now, since the Ottomans weren't just about to okay like spy bees, oh, you want to send some spies to the whole of it? Absolutely. It was suggested that they send some local boys, some local like English boys who were already in the Ottoman Empire playing at archaeology, right?

• 20:42Robert Evans?

  And that is how T E Lawrence and his friend Seed L Woolley find themselves called upon to act as spies for the mother country. Lawrence was described by his mentor to the shell organization created to execute this expedition as someone who quote, gets on very well with the natives. He has, I think, more the instincts of an explorer, but is very shy, right? That's like the, the, what gets him this job as like, you know, he's kind of doing some James Bond shit, you know, MI6, MI5 doesn't exist then, but like, that, that's very much what he's doing here, right? He's being brought in by the state to help provide cover to an espionage operation.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  Now, he and Woolley insist that Dome be hired as a photographer and general assistant to the team. They have, they are carrying out a real historical survey, but that survey is also cover to this group of actual spies that are being sent like as assistants, but are there to do their actual like spy work, right? Lawrence is aware of this and he writes back to his mom, we are obviously meant as red herrings. Now, the trip-

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I love how they could trust the mail so well back then.

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  Oh, of course. Nobody would look in the mail.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:55Robert Evans?

  Now, the trip was mostly uneventful for our purposes, save that it marks the first time Lawrence found himself traveling the Sinai and thinking about the military value of different towns and forts along the way. One morning, he and Woolley were late, meeting up with their baggage men because they were hunting a gazelle. Their cam- Which had bolted the night before were found and the Egyptian police were contacted in a panic. Lawrence wrote home that, quote, "The result was wild telephoning all over the frontier. The Turks were wandering over their hills. About forty Arabs were arrested and brought in as hostages for our reappearance. And meanwhile, we were sitting quietly, wondering where in the world our tents had got to." Now, to anyone else, this would just be kind of like a funny moment, but Lawrence, being very perceptive, takes something crucial from the experience.

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  He writes, quote, "It shows how easily it is, in an absolutely deserted country, to defy a government." And this is going to lead him to one of the most important realizations of the last 150 years. After the expedition, Lawrence and Woolley went back to their dig. Woolley left around June, but as was usual, Lawrence stayed. He got regular pushes to go back home, but in the last 18 months had spent just three weeks in England. Daum and another local friend of his, Hamudi, had by this point heard stories from Lawrence about home, and they'd repeatedly asked, "Hey, can we, we would like to see, you've spent so much time in our home, we would like to see England, right?" And eventually, in 1913, in the last summer before the world went mad, Lawrence obliged them.

• 23:25Robert Evans?

  Now, they stayed about 10 days. He brings these, these two Arab friends of his, and they stayed for 10 days in Oxford. They are mostly treated as like curiosities. They give like speeches and stuff in public where people get to question them about like their lives and their home. And for the most part, I, you know, I think it's kind of interesting that this happened, but it's not super relevant to like our question, you know, where do we put this guy morally? There is one anecdote here that I think is worth reciting to you. And so I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's book, The Young T. E. Lawrence, where he writes about a story that Hamudi told of this visit after Lawrence's death. Quote, "Many wished to photograph us, Hamudi and Daum, as we sat with him, Lawrence, in our customary clothes. And after they took a picture, they would come and speak to him, and always he said,

• 24:10Robert Evans?

  'No, no.' One day I asked why he was always saying, 'No, no,' and he laughed and said, 'I will tell you, these people wish to give you money, but for me, you would now be rich.'" "Don't call yourself my friend, Hamudi." shouted, and say thus calmly that you kept me from riches. It was a rare moment of cultural division between them. It also showed that the Syrians understood the wealth and privilege of their young friend. Hamudi remembered that Lawrence had laughed at his anger, and the more he laughed, the angrier Hamudi became. Then Lawrence said, yes, you might have been rich, richer than any in Jerobulus. And I, what should I have been? I should have been the showman of two monkeys. And suddenly, Hamudi admitted, all my anger died down within me.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 24:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he's thinking about what he's doing.

• 24:58Robert Evans?

  Yes, he is. He is attempting to, not that he does it perfectly, but he is trying to think ethically about the complexity and the class dynamics and wealth dynamics and disparity of his relationship with these guys.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Oh, that's fascinating, because I was already thinking about how it's like, well, when he goes there, they're not like putting him in a, on stage and being like, tell us about the weird, wacky, cold place you're from, you know?

• 25:21Robert Evans?

  And that does happen here, and he's like conscious, and he's like, I don't want to turn this into me prostituting these boys for orientalist reasons, right?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  That seems bad to me.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Right. On the other hand, he probably could have been like.

• 25:36Robert Evans?

  He could have talked this out with them, right? There is some of that paternalism here, you know?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Right, totally, because they could have been like, yeah, no, let's get rich, fuck it.

• 25:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. They could have made that decision, and he, again, he's definitely paternalistic, he's older than them. You know, this isn't unproblematic perfectly, but I also, it's interesting to me that he is really trying to think about this in an ethical sense. That somewhat comports with our modern ethics.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:02Robert Evans?

  You know what doesn't comport with our modern ethics, Margaret?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Is it, uh, our ads?

• 26:09Robert Evans?

  They sure don't, but you know what? I like being able to pay my mortgage.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Me too. And we all just get to talk about it and then make these decisions together.

• 26:17Robert Evans?

  That's right. Let's make some decisions together. Let's you and me prostitute ourselves.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 26:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  That sounds great.

• 26:26Robert Evans?

  That sounds great.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Games on a break? Don't doom scroll. Try rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real, physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokémon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door, or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 27:00Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by Vive Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 27:24Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 27:59Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 28:08Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, when the war broke out in August of 1914, the time of leisurely afternoons, painting and reading with Dome were over. Based on his work in Palestine the previous year, Lawrence was offered a commission in the Army Intelligence Corps as a second lieutenant. This landed Lawrence, who's now in kind of like his mid to late twenties, in Cairo, which is where the movie begins to show us his story, right? This is where the 1962 film starts. I think it's valuable that we have, we've got a little bit back there. By the time the fighting started, Kitchener's interest in sparking an Arab revolt had only

• 28:48Robert Evans?

  deepened, and he'd had several clandestine conversations with Prince Hussein Ibn Ali, the Arab nobleman charged with protecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Kitchener and his advisors believed that Prince Hussein could be used to sever much of the Arab world from the Ottomans and prevent them from functioning as an ally to Germany. Now, Prince Hussein was not the only potential game in town for the Brits. Kitchener and his allies supported him as the new caliph, while others backed a young chieftain from Riyadh named Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud. Now, I want you to think about that last name, Saud, for a hint as to what his family's doing today.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're doing pretty well.

• 29:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're doing quite well, some of the evilest people on planet Earth, and Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud sucks ass, too. Now, so does Prince Hussein. Both of these guys are huge dicks. And a big part of why this Arab revolt doesn't end in a better place for the Arab world, you know, I would say overwhelmingly the blame is on the Ottomans and the European powers, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that the local leaders, you know, the Arab leaders of this revolt are also assholes, right? And that, that plays a role in the structures that get set up, you know, at the end of this all, right?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:06Robert Evans?

  Now, Saud is Wahhabi, right? Which is a Puritan strain of Islam that is also strongly anti-idolatry. And Prince Hussein is a guy, he is a real asshole about it. He is super anti-woman. He is a very strict, he's also a Puritan, right? He's the guy who like bans drinking in Mecca, you know? But he is also, he's not a Wahhabist, because the Wahhabis, they're anti-idolatry, and Prince Hussein kind of wants to be worshipped almost as much as Allah, right? Like, and so he doesn't like the anti-idolatry stuff about Wahhabism.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  He's like humility, humility is no good.

• 30:43Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, that's not my bag! I am a prince!

• 30:50Robert Evans?

  Now, the outbreak of World War I has been a disaster for Mecca, right? Which is, tourism would be like, kind of the wrong way of saying, but it's like religious pilgrimage, right, is like, what the city does. That's where its money comes from. People aren't doing as much of that after the whole war decides like, what if we take all these young men who were, you know, around to go on pilgrimages to Mecca and the like, and instead we feed them to each other's machine guns, you know? And honestly, a great, this is a great time to be a machine gun. Bad time to be a young man. So, traffic to Mecca collapses, and the economy follows with it. And I'm gonna quote from James Barr's book here.

• 31:34Robert Evans?

  "Meccans were reduced to selling their furniture and the ornately carved wooden doors and fretwork windows of their houses for firewood to feed themselves. These screens shielded their womenfolk indoors from prying eyes. It was a deeply humiliating resort to have to take."

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, Prince Hussein blames the suffering and the war itself on the secular modernizing of the Ottomans, which he says violated the Quran by, for instance, allowing women to work in the post office. A major reason why Hussein gets on board with being like the figurehead of an Arab revolt against the Ottomans is he goes to Constantinople a couple of years back, and he sees women working at the post office, and he is, he loses his mind. He absolutely goes fucking batshit over like ladies at the post office. This guy is the anti-wokest of the anti-wokes. He describes lady post office workers as "an evil that will greatly injure us if it increases."

• 32:36Robert Evans?

  Like, all this debate, "Why did this terrible war happen? Why are we slaughtering each other?" It's lady post office workers! So out of his mind.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  The word's mailman.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  Mailman, goddammit. Yeah. Prince Hussein, real piece of shit in this story.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:53Robert Evans?

  Now, debate raises-

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Is this who Lawrence is gonna end up backing? Anyway.

• 32:55Robert Evans?

  This is, this is who, this is who Lawrence and England end up backing, although this is not who Lawrence personally backs.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:02Robert Evans?

  Hussein is the father of the guy that Lawrence is really sees as being the, the great leader, right? So debate rages within sort of the British intelligence and military establishments. It's very similar to how like during the Syrian civil war, you had like the US kind of military intelligence back the Kurds and you had like the CIA back these kind of alliances of like rebel groups. What you have within, you know, the military and the, the intelligence arms of kind of the British state are backing two dit- like Saud or Hussein, right?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Oh shit, okay.

• 33:34Robert Evans?

  And there's a lot of argument over like who is better. And this is, it's also worth noting that when we're parsing out the morality of this, what, what Great Britain is doing here, playing with these people's lives is evil. What Prince Hussein is doing here, trying to get absolute power, make himself into a caliph is evil, right? The, the other Arabs, by the way, he wants to specifically be king of this massive greater Arab state and like wants to be ruling Iraq and Syria because that's prestigious and the Hajaz is a backwater. People, the Arabs in Iraq and Syria don't want this guy ruling them, you know? They don't like him more than they like the Ottomans. In some cases, a lot less, right? But also when we're talking about like the morality of this, you know, what Great Britain is doing here is fucked up.

• 34:18Robert Evans?

  The Ottomans are actively doing a genocide. They are doing the Armenian genocide in this period of time. So there's not like a, there's not like a, ah, these are the, this is the shining bright side of this conflict to back. These guys were the real heroes here. Everyone's an imperialist and everyone's a piece of shit, you know? Lawrence might have the most noble, you know, kind of alongside a lot of the like individual dudes who are just like fighting because like seems like the Ottomans suck. But of the people with like power in this, he's at least less objectionable than some. Spends the first two years of his time as an intelligence agent from 14 to 16 in Egypt, in Cairo, writing intelligence summaries from hundreds of sources across the region, right?

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  Other people are bringing in data. He is like turning it into briefings and sending it out, right? And he becomes, as a result of this duty, he's a guy who studies constantly. He's fascinated in the culture of the region and he becomes acquainted with the history of the Bedouins. These are the nomadic peoples in the Hijaz, in this, in the Arab peninsula. And they are primarily, the way everyone sees them, raiders and bandits, right? Uh, they had, they fight a lot within each other. They are a clanish tribal people and they make a lot of their living from like banditry, you know?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Comparable to the Kurds at the time, maybe?

• 35:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's a lot of similarities. Uh, yeah, yeah, I mean, you could definitely draw that in some, in some ways, right? And like, you know, you've got some of these guys like Prince Hussein, who have started to urbanize. But you also have these people who like, they very much do live this nomadic existence. Except for the fact that they have guns, not different from how they would have lived 700 years ago. And like Muhammad was alive, right?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  So the fact that Lawrence is starting to understand these people and study them was going to prove crucial to what comes next. But at the time, he's really frustrated that he's like forced to just sit on his ass and do nothing. In May of 1915, less than one year into the war, his brother Frank had been killed in France. Four months later, his youngest son, Will, was shot down and perished.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Youngest brother?

• 36:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, youngest brother, Will, was shot down and perished. So he loses two brothers in the first two years of the war while he's sitting in this office in Cairo.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  Being bored and he is racked with survivor's guilt over this. He and his brothers had been very close. In letters home to his mother, he veered between shows of strength. "In a time of such fearful stress in our country, it is one's duty to watch every, to watch very carefully, lest one of the weaker ones be offended." But he also complained to her, "We do nothing here except sit and think out harassing schemes of Arabian policy. My hair is getting very thin and gray. I'm going to be in Cairo till I die." You know, he's an emotional guy. He's going through a lot here. This is a complex time to him and his grief is compounded by fury at the failed allied invasion of Gallipoli. Masterminded by friend of the pod Winston Churchill, this was a vast invasion by sea

• 37:20Robert Evans?

  of the Ottoman coast that ended in just, just the worst fuck up ever, right? One of the great disasters in military history.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just a calamitous fuck up. Now Lawrence writes a report on precisely why the campaign, which he termed a disgrace, failed. It was buried, this report of his, to protect the people who'd planned it, right? We can't have Winston Churchill getting criticized here. And it's a very good report. James Schneider writes in his book Guerrilla Leader, he discovered then the reality in modern war, that the civilian population will always suffer when a European power pursues its national interests without regard to the culture and political aspirations of the native populace, right? And so this, this is kind of like, he makes a, he makes a decision here that to be different,

• 38:11Robert Evans?

  that like, we have to be different because like, if we're not, if we make these decisions based purely on what we know and think of war without any kind of like, uh, uh, you know, without any sort of openness to the realities on the ground, we wind up walking into disasters, right?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:28Robert Evans?

  He's trying to preach against Vietnam syndrome, right? Where you're just like stumbling, well, we're America. We know how to fight a war. This is how you do it. I don't need to know shit about this country, right?

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  I'll just fight this the way I fight every war. Oops. Turns out it's a different part of the world. That doesn't work here, you know?

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And wasn't a big thing is that when the Brits were trying to fight in the Ottoman Empire, like because there just wasn't transportation and all this thing, like the modern method of moving all of the arms and all those things just like fell apart.

• 38:55Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah. I mean, a lot of it's supply issues and stuff, but this was also stuff, if, if there had been more knowledge of the realities of the geography of the era, like they, they wouldn't have tried it, right?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Right, totally.

• 39:06Robert Evans?

  This is a thing with more knowledge and less arrogance, you would just like, no, we can't do this. We don't have the capacity.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:13Robert Evans?

  On June 10th, 1916, Prince Hussein had been goaded sufficiently into action that he used a small force of fighters to lay siege to the Turkish garrison at Mecca. They took it after three days, but the rebellion lost steam after that. Medina did not fall. And it was clear to anyone with eyes that the Ottomans would soon exact a punishment because their garrison in Medina is isolated, but they've got this train that can like get stuff down there. So they have the ability, eventually we'll get enough guys there that will crack down on this little rebellion. Now, much of the internal debate in this period among the British revolved around whether or not we should send our own troops in to stop the Ottomans from like crushing this rebellion, specifically from capturing a place called Rabih, which contained valuable wells

• 39:58Robert Evans?

  that would allow resupply for an attack on Mecca. The problem was twofold. Number one, if the British sent in Christian soldiers, white guys, right? That would infuriate soldiers because like Christians are not supposed to be in the Holy Land, you know? And that would dry up support for the rebellion if it's seen as like, oh, this is really just a British thing? Oh, the British are in this, you know? Like, maybe people aren't going to be willing to die if they're like, oh, so we're just, we're just fighting to become slaves of the British Empire? Well, I don't like that any better, right? But at the same token, the British have this option. We have all these Muslim soldiers, right? From India. We can send in with modern guns and they would probably make a difference, but if

• 40:42Robert Evans?

  we send in Muslim soldiers, no one's going to believe that Prince Hussein is backed by us. And that's also necessary because otherwise, why would you take him seriously if he doesn't have the backing of a great power? Right? So it's this like catch 22 situation, you know, of like, we can't send in white guys, but nobody takes it as seriously unless they see some white guys. And Lawrence is on the side of arguing that we absolutely cannot send in British soldiers, right? And he argues, interestingly, he takes the stance that not only should we not send in British soldiers, they're not needed. The Bedouins can, on their own, defeat the Ottomans in Hija, so long as we arm them properly, right? His attitude is, we don't need to send in troops, they can handle. This, they just need guns.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  Um, now he is also terrified. A big motivation for, for Lawrence is that the French are poking around this situation. They keep being like, oh, you guys don't want to send in troops? We got troops. We can send in troops and then ends in maybe, maybe the Arab peninsula is a French peninsula. You know, perhaps we wind up with Syria. Yeah. Like that is, that is what the, the French want Syria in particular, right? Like they, they see this as like natural French territory, Syria.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Everywhere is natural French territory.

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  Everywhere is natural French territory, right? Now Lawrence, he's not just, he's not just doesn't like this because the British and the French don't like each other traditionally. He is a man of the world and he is aware that the French, when they took Algeria, immediately carried out a hideously brutal genocide. And he's like, well, if they take Syria, they're going to do another genocide, right? Like, that's just how the French be. He argued in letters meant to be read by other British officers, that supporting Prince Hussein as the new caliph also would effectively neuter Islam as a threat to the empire. Right? So there's a very imperialist slate to this too, although the question is, does he believe that like, ah, we can neuter Islam as a threat to our ambitions in India?

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  Or does he know that saying that will get people to back his play back home?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  This is one of the hardest things when you look at history.

• 42:46Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yes. Especially since Lawrence lies to his Arab allies. And he lies to his British masters. He lies constantly to them. So it is not, he, he, he is, you know, deceitful to some of these Arabs that he claims to care about. And he is deeply deceitful to all of his superior officers. So the idea that he would just be like, oh yeah, this'll stop Islam from overthrowing, you know, the Indian subcontinent or whatever. Like if he thought that lie would work, he would say it, you know? It's not necessar- it could be instead of Orientalism, just him trying to manipulate his bosses, right?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Who he knows are Orientalists.

• 43:25Robert Evans?

  Who he knows are Orientalists, right?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 43:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, "You know what's missing? Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch." And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just five bucks. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokémon, with new, limited edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home. Or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  And the cash goes right in your account. No listing it online, no stranger lowballing you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 44:39Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 45:03Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 45:38Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 45:48Robert Evans?

  Anyway, Lawrence kind of makes a name for himself in all of these arguments. And he's also because of some, I'm not going to get into all of the politicking within the British military establishment, but he winds up getting to go along with like his boss to the Hijaz in order to like meet some of these people because the other guy who like should have gone in his place was too controversial as a result of all these arguments over who to back and whether or not to send troops. So Lawrence gets to go, this is his first time kind of going to the Hijaz. And over the course of 10 days, he meets and befriends the prince's son, Faisal, Faisal Hussain. And Faisal is the guy, he's the guy that you see in the movie and he's the guy that

• 46:30Robert Evans?

  like Lawrence is actually going to back as the leader of this future Arab state that he wants to incite to rebellion and independence. Faisal and him get along so well that Faisal kind of insists that Lawrence become his appointed liaison to the British Army. And Lawrence, for his part, becomes convinced that Faisal is the future of the revolt, writing back that he has, that Faisal has, quote, "leadership, not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire."

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Thus the title of the book.

• 47:03Robert Evans?

  Thus the title of Barr's book. Now, the primary opponents of arming the rebellion countered Lawrence by arguing that the Bedouin were, in one officer's words, "untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle." And this is a complicated, there's a lot of like back and forth where like there'll be promised arms, Lawrence will kind of say like, "Oh, I just got back from my boss's, guns are coming in, so we need to carry out this attack." But like the guns are coming and like the guns are not coming. Lawrence is lying to them. He's pretending that this has been done. He's doing it because he wants to, he's trying to motivate them to carry out attacks that he thinks that they can succeed at, and they in fact do succeed at, right? But he is also lying to them. And also the British are just, it's paternalism, right? It's the same thing.

• 47:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. And also separately, the British are just, say, agreeing to send arms and then there will be some like behind the scenes fight and they'll be like, "Oh, actually, we can't do that," right? Although, you know, a lot of arms do wind up getting to these rebels, right? So Lawrence knows that, you know, in order to kind of secure support for Faisal, to get these arms, he has to make a case very clearly to his very hesitant superiors that the Bedouins can win this war, right? Lawrence arrived shortly after the situation in the southern Hajaz had devolved into a stalemate, one that favored the Turks. Faisal's men had worn out a lot of their initial strength, failing to chew through the defenses of Medina, but the Turks had made unexpected retreats after rumors of

• 48:32Robert Evans?

  an error of attack, which had allowed Faisal's men to capture the port of Rabig in the first place. This was confusing because they'd moved vastly superior forces into the region. It was in analyzing their decisions here, like why all of this happened, that Lawrence would make his first key realization. And here is how Schneider describes it. "Why did the Turks waver? It occurred to Lawrence that perhaps the virtue of irregulars lay in depth, not in face, and that it had been the threat of the attack by them upon the Turkish northern flank which had made the enemy hesitate so long. The actual Turkish flank ran from their front line at Rabeg, their face, in Lawrence's words, to Medina, a distance of some 50 miles.

• 49:16Robert Evans?

  But if we moved towards the Hajaz railway behind Medina, we might stretch our threat and accordingly their flank as far, potentially, as Damascus, 800 miles away to the north. Such a move would force the Turks to the defensive and we might regain the initiative." Do you see what he's saying here? Because this is the core of his understanding of how to do an insurgent struggle.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  You can present yourself as everywhere at once and it messes up a regular army.

• 49:43Robert Evans?

  Exactly. We've got this like 50 mile front, and in a conventional European war, that would be the threat area, right? That would be the attack, that's the area they'd have to worry about. But because we have all of these tiny little units of guys on camel who are capable of traveling for weeks at a time and then carrying out insurgent attacks, the actual area they have to defend is 800 miles deep. And so they can't attack and regain the initiative the way they otherwise would be able to, because they have to have forces split off and be aware of all of these potential, everywhere is vulnerable, right? And by doing that, we don't actually even have to carry out all that many attacks, just the reality of our threat opens possibilities to us.

• 50:28Robert Evans?

  Now.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  It's kind of like the IRAs, uh, we only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time.

• 50:34Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 50:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's what he is starting to realize here. You know, the Bedouins know the terrain much better than the Turks, who are not locals, and they can travel in small groups almost indefinitely with minimal need for resupply, launching frontal attacks with these, and there's not many of them. The Bedouins are not a numerous people. These are, you know, nomads are not a high population group in the desert. So you don't want to use them the way British officers instinctively wanted to use them by like, sending them to run at guns until they were all gone. You know, that is kind of what a lot of Lawrence's superiors see as like, well, this is how you fight a war, right? We just throw them at guns and like, oh, they're not good at being thrown at guns. There's, there's this whole thing, the British like really have this distaste for these, these Bedouin troops because like,

• 51:21Robert Evans?

  they're scared of artillery. They don't like to get blown up. It must be because like their religion tells them they won't go become whole in heaven if they get blown up. So like fools, they're scared of field guns.

• 51:36Robert Evans?

  This, this cowardly Arab terror at being exploded.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Which is funny because isn't all of war changing after World War One where we like?

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  Yes, it should be.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  No one's good at running at machine gun nests. It's a bad idea.

• 51:50Robert Evans?

  But they still have it. The British have not really figured this out yet. Some of them have, but like a lot of, a lot of people are still doing the old ways. And yeah, there's like this whole, can you believe these cowardly Muslims don't like to explode? Not like our good English boys. They love blowing up in fields. They can't blow up enough.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  It's so fucking funny to me. They're just like looking at generations being wiped out in the trenches for nothing. And like, why don't the Muslims like this? These primitive people hate dying.

• 52:32Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's so funny. So Lawrence is like, we don't, we shouldn't be wasting them, right? Like, there's not a lot of these guys, and they can do so much more damage if we split them into these tiny, like, fire teams and send them in behind the lines to fuck shit up, right? And that will open opportunities for us to carry out mass attacks in areas when we have the advantage and when we can actually sweep over them without taking nightmarish casualties.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Which is the, the actual reality of guerrilla wars is not just these isolated strikes. You have to also work with the, like, mass attacks.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  No, it is, it's what you call, the, the, the modern term is it's a strategy of tension. If you keep enough tension on the enemy to where they have this massive flank that they have to defend, then they will, they will make mistakes. They will expose areas that you then can take with more conventional attacks.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, Lawrence advised his allies to move troops away from prepared defenses and towards operating a terrain that would let them strike at the railway. With one redeployment, Faisal's men went from threatening a single city to 200 miles of this railway. Lawrence began to take part in raids on isolated Turkish units defending chunks of railway or on patrol. Over the course of three months, he got a feel for his Bedouin troops. Being largely composed of family units from a culture with a low population, they had little stomach for casualties. At one key battle in January 1917, the Arab forces overran Ottoman defenders in a town called Waj alongside British infantry and naval support. The Brits lost one man.

• 54:09Robert Evans?

  The Arab tribesmen lost 20. Now, the British officers in charge of this operation had all fought in France, and they were like, fucking 21 dudes to take a town? This is great, right?

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:20Robert Evans?

  Lawrence had to caution them that, like, no, no, no, the Bedouin don't feel like this is a great victory. Quote, "Instead, he feared, their deaths might easily upset Arab morale. Our rebels were not materials like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting in our leadership." In his book, yeah, I do love that, like soldiers, you know, they're just materials. They're trash, basically, right? He's like, no, no, these guys are our buddies and they don't like to see their family die. Right? You are going to war with your uncle. It's not just a casualty, right? Like that's your uncle got killed.

• 54:57Robert Evans?

  In his book, James Barr notes that Lawrence later added this explanation. "We were not in command nationally, but by invitation, and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army."

• 55:12Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a better way to run a, I mean, I guess it's probably bad, like strategically in some, well, actually, that's not true.

• 55:20Robert Evans?

  Not in this war, yeah.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it makes them think more carefully instead of just throwing people in the machine gun nest. Yeah, no.

• 55:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is, it is the right, and it's why this, this war that, that is carried out over the Arab revolt and in broader terms, a lot of, because this isn't the only part of the war in, in the Middle East, right? The British are carrying out a conventional military actions, trying to take the Holy Land in this period, which have been disastrous up to this point. There's an attempted invasion of Jerusalem that's just a fucking catastrophe, you know? But, but there are more conventional attacks, but where they're taking and, and like large chunks of land and like entire influential cities and ports, and you're seeing like, two guys died in this battle, right? Two of our guys died, right? Like that is the theater where Lawrence is active because they are thinking smart, you know?

• 56:07Speaker 02

  That, that's cool.

• 56:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. Now, one of the reasons why the Europeans had not felt, as I said, that the Bedouins could be good soldiers is that they're scared of artillery. And Lawrence, in these letters he's writing back to like the British general staff argues, this isn't, they're not scared of hardship itself, like they're not scared of fighting, they're not even scared of dying, you know? He writes this in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. "In mass, they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline, nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit, the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks. But three or four Arabs in their hills..." Would stop a dozen Turks. Napoleon remarked this of the Mamluks.

• 56:52Robert Evans?

  We were yet too breathless to turn our hasty practice into principle. Our tactics were imperial snatchings. We're empirical snatchings of the first means to escape difficulty. But we were learning like our men. This recognition that again, you know, just thinking about modern times is like, well, if you get a thousand of these people together, it's just chaos, right? Like everyone's fighting with each other. People don't really get along very well. They certainly don't trust each other in battle. But if you separate them into these three and four man groups, then you can make them extremely effective, right? And then maybe occasionally take the risk of having them carry out larger actions.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this is the way that I would assume my friends would be useful.

• 57:32Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  And not otherwise.

• 57:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So his first few months in theater were too chaotic and violent for much in the way of groundbreaking strategy, overarching strategy to occur to him, right? He's kind of, it's catch as catch can. But later in March, Lawrence gets lucky, by which I mean he nearly dies from another one of his constant illnesses. He gets this horrible mix of like boils and malaria and the shits.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Boil malaria shit.

• 57:58Robert Evans?

  Boil malaria shit. Yeah. He spends 10 days dying in a tent. To distract himself from dying, he spends all of the time kind of like hallucinating from dehydration and writing out the most influential military theory of the century.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 58:14Robert Evans?

  And he is, he is like, he's consolidating here these, this, these years of military theory that he had studied back in school and applying it to his experiences thus far in the Hajaz. And as he's trying to do this, his mind is drawn to an Austrian general, Maurice de Sax, who back in the early 1700 had decided that the generals of his day spent too much time worried about tactical details. How do I move this unit in opposition to this unit, right? In order to get a flag? How do I, how do I get this unit of riflemen? How do I get cavalry around their side to flank this one group of guys, right? That's a tactical problem, right? And de Sax is like, really? The game is figuring out larger operational concerns. What he calls the higher problems of war. Now, interestingly.

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  Interestingly enough, de Saxe had written his book, which is kind of the precursor to Lawrence's groundbreaking work while he was dying for two weeks in a tent.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  I mean, it makes sense. It's like, otherwise you're busy.

• 59:09Robert Evans?

  That's what you do.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Two things soldiers love, cigarettes and dying in tents.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:18Robert Evans?

  So de Saxe had written a book about war that provided the framework for Lawrence's understanding of how the Bedouins fought. An article I found helpful in all this is T E Lawrence and the Art of War in the 21st Century by George Gaurich. He writes, "De Saxe offered a theory of war based on the model of a general who practiced the dictum that a war might be won without fighting battles. Whether Lawrence was aware of this or not, others had presented a similar ideal. Some 2,500 years earlier, Sun Tzu, the most famous Chinese- Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Sun Tzu has a quote about this, right? And he's the guy, you'll see him recommended often today in the reading of Instagram posts of guys who want to sell you unregulated testosterone.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  I know, even though it's like still worth reading.

• 1:00:00Robert Evans?

  It's still worth reading and Lawrence is going to use, he's not reading Sun Tzu here, but he's going to use de Saxe who's saying a similar thing in a very useful way. It has become clear to him that the Ottoman ability to project power rested entirely on the Hejaz railway, which ran the length of the peninsula and cut through this infinity of desert. But the railway was incredibly vulnerable. It is so long, you can't have men stationed on every inch of it. And Ottoman troops have very little ability to maneuver outside of where the railway takes them. Now, any fool with soldiers can tell you that if your enemy has a train, blow it up. But Lawrence is smarter than this. He's like, no, no, no, don't blow it up. That's the worst thing to do. If you destroy the train, so it can't operate,

• 1:00:44Robert Evans?

  your enemy has to adapt and find a different way of getting troops and supplies in theater. And when they adapt, that will make them less vulnerable to you. If you just buck with the railway constantly, damaging bits and pieces of it, they'll have to keep repairing it. They'll have to keep sending troops to these different areas to repair it. They're going to have their repair crews. They're going to be like spending resources to do this. And every resource that they scramble to defend and repair this railway is a source that's not out there actually pressing the attack or defending other territory, right? You want to keep them on the railway. You just want to fuck with it a little bit, you know? Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  World military.

• 1:01:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Okay, now I'm like, yep, this man is smart.

• 1:01:31Robert Evans?

  This man is smart. This is a guy with some stuff going on under the hood.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Robert Evans?

  Now, world military history is filled with insurgent movements. Alexander the Great dealt with this shit, and he was not the first imperial warlord to do so. What makes Lawrence special is not just his understanding of guerrilla tactics, but how to marry them to the larger, greater power struggle. And here's Gauratji again. In developing his own theory of a regular war, Lawrence identified three key elements for analysis: the algebraic, the biological, and the psychological. The algebraic element of things refers to the physical environment that has shaped warfare in the Hejaz. For Lawrence, this was the decisive moment. Using simple math, Lawrence calculated the size of territory held by the Arabs in relation to the number of Ottoman troops in theater. The Ottomans, with only 16,000 troops in Arabia

• 1:02:22Robert Evans?

  and with a shortage of staunch Arab allies among the tribes, lacked enough soldiers to establish effective control over 140,000 square miles of territory. Geography, the vast desert, gave the Arab revolt sanctuaries that the Ottomans could not seize and hold for any length of time. As noted by Lawrence, "to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife." I just love his writing.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Robert Evans?

  "The Arabs possessed safe havens in the vast desert and therefore had the time to conduct a protracted struggle. They received critical assistance from the British Army, an army that posed serious threat to Palestine. Consequently, the Ottoman High Command felt it could ill afford to spare additional troops to quell the Arab uprising. Foreign assistance and a distracted enemy proved a window of opportunity for the rebellious Arabs." So a key part of this, it's not just that we're threatening this whole area, we're threatening this train, and that diverts Ottoman troops. The war, the great power war, the British Army, that hasn't succeeded in taking the Holy Land but threatens it, also blocks troops away. And so we, he is looking at, Lawrence is looking at, these very local, small unit actions in the, as part of this grander struggle,

• 1:03:34Robert Evans?

  which is exactly, by the way... What the Vietnamese are going to do, right? They don't have this vast desert, but they have Laos and Cambodia. They have these underground tunnels. This is their safe haven, right? And what the Vietcong are doing very much exists not just in concert with the greater struggle being waged by other Vietnamese elements like the NVA, this conventional army, but in the greater power struggle of the Cold War. All of these different conflicts that have an impact on who can send resources where and what can be sent where, right? And how much things can be escalated, right? Lawrence is the guy who is writing out, this is how you think about a conflict that is so broad in scope, it boggles your mind, right? That's where a lot of his genius comes in.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  No, that makes sense, because that's, yeah. Is that called grand strategy, or is that?

• 1:04:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, definitely. This is grand strategy, right?

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  I think that a lot of people are bad at that, because we're good at thinking about... We all think about tactics.

• 1:04:33Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  And then we even sometimes think about strategic goals, but we're rarely thinking about how that one strategic goal is going to affect how a different political power is going to be impacted and what they're going to do.

• 1:04:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's the mind of a domino, or it's the mind of, you know, it's domino theory. It's almost, he almost thinks about war the way an electrician has to think, right? Where you can't just be thinking about, where does this problem in this circuit? But how does all of this connect to this broader structure of like circuits and this broader flow of power, right? He's thinking about the flow of power, right? In a very literal sense.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's engineering.

• 1:05:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he is an engineer of war.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:05:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This is what elevates Lawrence's understanding beyond being just another guerrilla leader. These basic elements, this local guerrilla force pinning down an undermanned opponent, retreating to a safe haven backed by a foreign power, itself in separate conflict or conflicts with the occupier. This is how you would describe every great conflict of the last 75 years, right? Like, this is what, this is what everything is, right? This is, there's a lot of Israel-Palestine in here, right? And this conflict between, you've got Israel and the United States backing them, you've got Iran supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, you know? These are, this is the nature, the basic nature of all modern conflict, really.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Robert Evans?

  In other words, I just find this stuff cool. One of the many things that sets Lawrence apart from his colleagues is that he also has an understanding of his limitations. He knows, for example, I'm a white guy. I cannot be the leader of a grand Arab revolt. That is not my place. But he also knows how to find leaders and craft propaganda around them to turn them into heroes. And one of these heroes is a guy who's one of the coolest figures in this, although he's also, he's someone who does a lot of back dealing and wheeling and dealing. But Lawrence meets him in 1817, or in 1917, in April, Aouda Abu Tayi of the Hawitat tribe. A passage from Schneider's book that I love gives you an idea of like, what a fucking, almost, yeah, a storybook character this.

• 1:06:29Robert Evans?

  You could hardly invent like a cooler sounding protagonist. "Centuries earlier, the Hawitat arrived from the Hajaz, and now their clans prided themselves on being true nomads in the Bedouin manner. Aouda was a tribal archetype, a heroic leader and warrior in the tradition of Cochise, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull. His generosity made him poor, as his growing legend made him ever richer in reputation. He had taken 28 wives during his adult life. His body bore the scars of 13 wounds. He had seen most of his relations slain in countless raids. Aouda had slain 75 Arabs with his own hand. How many Turks? Aouda did not tally them. They simply did not count. His retinue compromised the fiercest men of the tribe, fighting Mahasides Aouda with

• 1:07:14Robert Evans?

  relentless courage." I've killed 70, I've personally in a hand-to-hand combat, killed 75 of the men that I consider men. Yeah, the people who count, yeah. Which is like, I mean, this guy's also a monster, but you know, he can't, like, undeniably badass. Yeah. I think paragraphs like this help make it clear also why Lawrence finds the Bedouin way of war so much more intoxicating than, say, the Western Front. If you're a draftee in the Western Front, your combat leader's prior life experience was like competing with other rich kids to molest underclassmen at Eton, right? Whereas if, in this war, if you wind up under Aouda, it's this guy from like, yeah, from like a fucking storybook, right? Yeah.

• 1:07:57Robert Evans?

  Washbuckling figure and Lawrence is a romantic, right? He is still enthralled with medieval poems of knights and ladies. This is catnip to him, right? Like, there was no chance of him not being on these guys' side once he starts to meet these people. Now, at the time, they met, Auda had about 500 fighters, half as many as he brought into the war. A desert pirate, he was frustrated trying to fight a conventional war. Auda saw himself as an epic hero. Schneider notes, this guy, in addition to everything I've said, Auda refers to himself exclusively in the third person.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course he does.

• 1:08:32Robert Evans?

  Of course he does. That's what you expect from a man who has killed dozens of men in hand-to-hand combat.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, by the time he gets your 10th wound and your 70th, man who actually counts, you start referring yourself in third person.

• 1:08:44Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Lawrence sat down with Faisal and Auda and explained his new theories about how the war should be run. He built to a thrilling conclusion where he argued that, rather than being outnumbered and outgunned, the farm or mobile Bedouins had a chance to attain superiority of men and materiel where it mattered. Quote, "But think of it, in regular terms, we are stronger than the Turks in transport, machine guns, cars and high explosives at the decisive point. We can deploy a highly mobile, lightly equipped striking force of the smallest size and use it successively at distributed points along the Turkish line to force them to strengthen their posts beyond the usual 20 men. This will be our shortcut to success." Right? This is this other recommendation, like,

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  war battles always go to who has the numbers? Who has the most men and guns? But that doesn't mean who has the most men and guns in total. It means where it matters, right?

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we're just some Sun Tzu shit.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  Where it matters, right? Exactly.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  You don't fight when you're gonna lose.

• 1:09:44Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Lawrence assured Auda and Faisal that allowing the Ottomans to keep Medina and the railway would work because it would keep their forces bottled up trying to defend these things while the Arabs took everything else. Quote, "His stupidity will be our ally, for he believes that his success depends on holding as many of the older provinces as possible. This pride in his imperial heritage will keep him in his present absurd position, all flanks and no front." Now, if you remember nothing else about the way empires think and function from these episodes, remember this, all flanks and no front. They can't really help themselves. That's just the way they are.

• 1:10:28Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  This is fascinating. I like this stuff. I like, I wonder how much, I wonder how much of this still does or doesn't work, right? Because, you know, the idea of like, oh, and then we disappear into the hills. I mean, I guess the Taliban did that to the US and Afghanistan. So I guess

• 1:10:45Robert Evans?

  very successfully, yeah. I mean, I think it does work. It just, people don't always get it right, you know? Like, we're looking right now at what's happening on a strategic level. I'm not talking at a moral level necessarily, but like, in Gaza, you know, with what Hamas, you know, has been doing, is this going to work out? Like, was it a good strategy? Is this going to work? We simply don't know. Like, a good strategy in terms of will they achieve ultimately their goals? That's unknown, right?

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:10Robert Evans?

  We can look at what the Taliban did and say they very successfully employed a version of this strategy. And it worked for them, right?

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Robert Evans?

  And we can look at, we can look at, to an extent, Iran in Iraq, right? Iranian influence in Iraq, and the degree of political power that it's given them in the modern day state, and like, the damage that they did to the United States, as another example of like, well, yeah, this is, you know, they were fairly successful, not to the same extent the Taliban was, but fairly successful with a strategy like this, right?

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Well, and you also get into the sort of fourth generational warfare thing of like, those who control the like, hearts and minds of the people are the people who control the people. Like, so it's like, which is why, I mean, it's why even the right wing wants to do mutual aid. Is that like, literally whoever is feeding the people is, if you feed people, that's where their allegiance is, right?

• 1:12:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  The system that feeds them. And, but it's interesting, because in a situation like this, it's just home territory.

• 1:12:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  And the Ottomans haven't really, I don't know enough about how the Ottomans were exerting power in that region, actually.

• 1:12:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, the same way empires generally did, right?

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Mostly extractively with some outposts.

• 1:12:22Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And they're not great at it, right? Again, this is, the Ottomans are a failing empire, right?

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff. Yep.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Magpie, do you have a new book that people can buy?

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  I do have a new book that people can buy. It's called The Sapling Cage, and if you like weird people running around who travel and do small-scale conflict, you might like this story about a young trans girl who wants to go be a witch and learns how to spear fight, because in my book, witches learn how to spear fight before they learn how to use magic.

• 1:13:00Robert Evans?

  And hey, maybe learn how to spear fight yourself, you know? It's very, what the Greeks always said about it is that it kind of just comes naturally. There's very little training, really, that you need. Poke a man with a spear. It's surprisingly easy. That's what John Brown thought, too.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Or not. Goodbye.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, it didn't work out well for him, but I'm like, actually, I mean,

• 1:13:20Robert Evans?

  Didn't work out well, but it, yeah, I mean, kind of did.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  His larger strategic goals were successful.

• 1:13:24Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:13:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so anyway.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:13:29Robert Evans?

  Make a spear.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  Game's on a break? Don't doom scroll, try rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real, physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door, or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash, only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 1:14:29Speaker 05

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.