Part Four: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Robert concludes the story of T. E. Lawrence by getting into the real bastardry of his life, including a pretty heinous war crime! 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.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  What's murdering 75 men in hand-to-hand combat? My Margaret, have you killed 75 men in hand-to-hand combat?

• 0:13Speaker 01

  I've been told to not comment on this until I'm more certain about a few statues.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  I would fucking follow you into war so fast. I'd be like, yes, yes, boss. Where are we going? Let me grab my axe. Let's go.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  That's gonna be conditional for me on what kinds of men you count when you're killing, right? You know, like Auda didn't count Turks, you know? Do you count Turks if you kill them in hand-to-hand combat? These are the questions that I need to know.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, chuds are the ones that I'm not certain count.

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  You don't count, no chuds, yeah.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I refer to my truck as a chud truck. And people think I refer to it as a chud truck because it looks like a truck a chud would drive. But actually, it's just very good at, um, [bleep]. Anyway.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  Auda would have been a truck guy. I think we can all agree on that.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  It's a shame that none of these people live long enough to see the Hilux.

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  I know. It's tragic. He was born for the Hilux. Oh, my God. Can you imagine how much Lawrence would have loved the Hilux?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  I got my oil change recently by this guy who was like trying to tell me about why it's worth it to import a Hilux.

• 1:26Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. You don't have to convince me, brother.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  The cost of importing the, he went over all of the prices of all of the importing the Hilux. And I was like, this no longer seems worth it. I thought the point of it was that it was cheaper than the other Toyota trucks.

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The point of it is that it's a Hilux, you know? That's just, that's just got some flair you can't replace.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  It has high classiness. It's in the name.

• 1:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I do feel some, some. I can understand Lawrence better now that I've gone into battle in the back of a Hilux in the fucking Arab world.

• 2:00Robert Evans?

  Driven across Syria, yeah. In an up armored Hilux, yeah, that that is a good life experience to have for for really getting TE Lawrence. Yeah, it would have been a lot of fun, probably, if we gotten to blow up a bridge or two, but that wouldn't have been helpful. In the situation we were in.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  No, just was a strategic scientifically.

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  Scientific, and I have no idea how to really do that. I would just blow up the bridge.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26Robert Evans?

  Now, when we discuss TE Lawrence, particularly when we try to answer the question, was he a bastard? You know, sitting at our computers in the fall of 2020. We've been forgetting to do cold opens, haven't we, Sophie?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  We just do them and then Dan will cuts them in later.

• 2:41Robert Evans?

  Dan will cuts them in later, well.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Hero and.

• 2:44Robert Evans?

  I don't know.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  Does Dan? Sorry.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  I just, it's fine.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder which men Dan will count. Yeah, I, it depends. I still don't know. I don't know what kind of men Dan will counts when he, when he, when he's killing men.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Sophie actually doesn't count men. It's pretty impressive.

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  Wow, wow. Only, only the women you kill. Okay.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05Robert Evans?

  That's good to know.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I would never kill women.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what Sophie just never kills anyone by Sophie's standards.

• 3:12Robert Evans?

  Woke swashbuckler who only counts the NBS he kills.

• 3:18Robert Evans?

  Men and women don't count to me. Just the baysims.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Each one counts for more than one. This is the plural, anyway.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Is this like a political ad that that plays during baseball games?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 3:33Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ, okay.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Far enough left with your jokes.

• 3:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you wind up doing a Trump ad.

• 3:43Speaker 03

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• 4:16Robert Evans?

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• 5:18Robert Evans?

  So when we discussed T E Lawrence while sitting in our computers in the fall of 2024, one thing probably stands. What?

• 5:28Robert Evans?

  What? That wasn't even a joke.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  I know, but so funny.

• 5:31Robert Evans?

  It's still pretty good. Yeah. One thing stands above every other matter, which is his support for the Balfour Declaration, particularly his support, I mean, because that was not made, he did not help make that, but he is, he, he is a supporter of Zionism in this particularly post-war period, right? When all of these European powers give their official support for a Jewish homeland and Palestine. Lawrence is not initially on that side, but he's going to wind up on that side, right? And given what's going on in Gaza right now, it's probably impossible to avoid having this dominate your thoughts on the man's legacy. And that's not entirely wrong. We are going to talk about his role here because it's significant. But it's important

• 6:11Robert Evans?

  to note that at the time, his feelings on Zionism are not what any of his critics, including in the Arab world, saw as the most problematic thing about the man. If you were a Westerner or a Turk, the top argument in your Lawrence's evil ledger probably would have been the war crimes. And so we're gonna talk about those first. The gist of this story is that after Lawrence escaped the Turks, the forces under his command exhibited increasingly brutal behavior on the battlefield. He started ordering his soldiers not to take prisoners, which is against the law. And in several cases began executing wounded men himself as they lay bleeding on the battlefield. He would just walk around battlefields afterwards,

• 6:51Robert Evans?

  shooting guys in the head, doing coup de grâce, cooing de grâce. Yeah. Okay. Which is, you know, bad. You're not supposed to do that. I mean, arguably, in a lot of these cases, that may have been the kindest thing to do, but it's not legal to do that.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:07Robert Evans?

  So he's cooing some de grâce, he's killing people. Scott Anderson, writing for Smithsonian Magazine, describes how his judgment seems to have degraded as well. And the general way, this often gets credited to like, the fact that he has just been gang raped, right? That like, this kind of, his mind breaks after that. Quote, "He attacked a Turkish troop train despite being so short of weapons that some of his men could only throw rocks at the enemy. If this was rooted in the trauma at De Rha, it seems he was at least as much driven by the desperate belief that if the Arabs could reach Damascus first, then the lies and guilty secrets he had harbored since coming to Arabia might somehow be set right." So that's kind of the debate here is like, is he traumatized because he's just been raped? And as a result, he's making all of these very rash moves.

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  He's becoming increasingly brutal in battle. Is it more that he's desperate to try and he's traumatized because he knows that he's kind of betraying his friends and he's trying to make things right by getting them to Damascus before the war ends, you know, in order to kind of cut off Sykes Picco at the knees, right?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  I think that's a strong argument to me because he wants to be a moral man and he knows he's not. So if he can find a loophole to loophole himself into morality by killing everyone.

• 8:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe that's the only thing he can do. There's also this argument that like Lawrence describes himself as a virgin and he is someone who his friends insist he has no discernible sexual leanings. And maybe there's this, the fact that it's forced upon him, like he has an extra strong reaction to it. We just will never know, you know?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I mean, he also grew up going to rape school.

• 8:43Robert Evans?

  He did go to, he did, he went to less rapey schools than a lot of other British boys of his, of his era, but like, I think that is kind of built into a lot of that school system, though.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:55Robert Evans?

  But we don't, I have no evidence as to whether or not anything like that happened to Lawrence. He certainly doesn't write about it.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  So even if you hold to the argument that Lawrence lied about the rape, and maybe he would have lied about that in order to explain why he was like obsessively trying to get the Arabs to Damascus, because that was kind of some like light treason against his own side.

• 9:17Robert Evans?

  Whatever's going on here, it makes total sense that his mental state would be degraded by this point. He has spent more than half of his time in Arabia deathly ill, sick with plague and heat stroke and catastrophic dehydration. He's experienced harrowing combat at close quarters. He had, he has blown his camel's brains out and been flung into the hot desert sands during a battle. So yeah, I mean, just not weird that he's kind of losing it at this point. And as Anderson notes, he's also weighed down with guilt over the fact that all these guys are fighting and dying with him, maybe for nothing, because his government might betray them. This all culminates in late September in an attack on a town called Deir Ha, where Lawrence had been. If he was raped, this is where that happened,

• 9:59Robert Evans?

  right? So if this is part of a general offensive that he is carrying out with Allenby, that's meant to coordinate with an attack by Allenby on Palestine in the north, right? Lawrence and his Bedouin allies are supposed to cut off the Turkish avenues of retreat by taking the railroad junction at Deir Ha. So one of the arguments here is that like, this is, you know, where he claims to have been tortured. So maybe what he's about to do is like him taking vengeance, you know, for that attack. And I'm going to quote from Anderson again. "After coming upon the village of Tafas, where the fleeing Turks had massacred many residents, Lawrence ordered his men to give no quarter. Throughout that day, the rebels picked apart a retreating column of 4,000, slaughtering all they found.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  But as Lawrence doubled back that afternoon, he discovered one unit had missed the command and taken 250 Turks and Germans captive. We turned our Hotchkiss machine gun on the prisoners, he noted in his battlefield report, and made an end of them. Lawrence was even more explicit about his actions that day in Seven Pillars. In a madness born of the horror of Tafas, we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals, as though their death and running blood could slake our agony."

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Whoops.

• 11:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So he's, he's, he's going full like corn berserker here, you know, he's, he's just massacring people. And, and it's, you know, the, the people he's massacring had also just massacred a bunch of civilians. It's a very ugly war, like war crime, plenty of war crimes to go around here, right? But this, this slaughter of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of prisoners and wounded men would have been a massive war crime in any theater of World War I, right?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  That's enough to put him in, like, yeah.

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  He belongs in Behind the Bastards now. Yeah, that's, that's, that's an international criminal court crime, right? Yeah. Now again-

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Many of the bastards you had on have killed like three people.

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Now that said, do I kind of sympathize with him still? Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 11:57Robert Evans?

  Like, this is just-

• 12:00Robert Evans?

  No, I don't know. I just don't know how likely it is that most commanders in a similar situation, having gone through what he's gone through, would have been much better, right? Especially since this is not entirely Lawrence, by his own admission, is partaking in the bloodshed. But a lot of this is just that his own troops are so angry at all of these war crimes that Turk, including on some of their families, right? And they're just bent for slaughter now, right? Like, everyone has just lost their minds. The war has gotten that ugly. So, anyway, you know, you can, you can parse that out morally, however you want to. You can judge him however you want to, sitting at your computer. We all

• 12:40Robert Evans?

  do to some extent. But yeah, from here, from Dura, Lawrence himself moved directly to Damascus, right? Like, he and his forces rush there, and they, they beat the Turks out of Damascus, and they beat European forces to the city. Now-

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I have a question.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  How did he get out of conscription rape jail?

• 13:03Robert Evans?

  He kind of just escapes.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:05Robert Evans?

  I mean, they're not, they're not great at, at, at doing guarding. They don't know that he's Lawrence of Arabia, right?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  He just sort of bounces, you know, after a while.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 13:16Robert Evans?

  So, this was an explicit and a direct attempt to destroy Sykes Pico. As soon as the city was in their hands, Lawrence helped organize a provisional Arab government headed by Faisal, right? Now, again, the Arabs don't really want, the Arabs of Syria don't really want Faisal in charge of them. They certainly don't want his dad in charge, but like, they have their own leaders, and they see, they don't really like guys from Mecca. They write about, like, these, these Arabs in Syria who are pissed about this, some of whom are, like, making overtures to the Ottomans because of how unhappy they are about Faisal. They kind of see Faisal and his dad, this whole family of, like, guys, the Sharif of Mecca, the way, like, rural Americans talk about, like, people from, like, San Francisco, or,

• 13:59Robert Evans?

  you know, DC, you know, that, they have the kind of, like, Richmond, north of Richmond, talk about them of, like, these fucking city assholes from Mecca, coming into Syria and telling us how to live our goddamn lives. I don't like that any better than the Turks, you know? And there's actually, there's this, this kind of Zionism is going to play a weird role in this here because it becomes kind of crucial to this conflict in between these different factions on the Arab revolt, right? So within a few days of, of the Arabs taking Damascus, General Allenby arrives and he's like provisional government, my ass, the French are in charge here now. And Lawrence, like, there's really nothing he can do, right? Allenby is his superior officer.

• 14:40Robert Evans?

  The British are there with like, you know, a significant amount of assets and this is, you know, kind of shatters him, right? Like, he is so distraught over the fact that all of their work, you know, even though they took the city, there, it's just been handed over to French control. He's so distraught by this that he begs to be relieved of command by Allenby. He leaves for London, hell bent on using his celebrity to win Western support for an independent Arab nation after this. Now, as a note, Lawrence was definitely a very famous over in Europe by this point. An American journalist based in Palestine, Lowell Thomas, had like spotted his story and been like, well, this is one of the most interesting things happening in the war.

• 15:23Robert Evans?

  It's much more interesting than just like recording slaughter at the various trench fronts. I'm going to follow this guy around. I'm going to take some video and photographs and whatnot. And he puts together like a lecture show, basically like a slideshow with a lecture attached to it that runs in movie theaters. It's like a matinee hit in England. It's a huge blockbuster at the time. Like prior to the 1960 Lawrence of Arabia, this is kind of like the first movie version of Lawrence and it's portrayed as journalism, but Lowell is a, he's like a tabloid guy, right? Like he is exaggerating, he's kind of outright lying about stuff.

• 16:02Robert Evans?

  There's some evidence that Lawrence is deeply, deeply unhappy as a result of like the kind of attention that Lowell draws on him and how much he makes Lawrence the center of the story. But he's also able to use this fame in order to secure meetings with like politicians to try and talk up Faisal's side of things. Right as during like these negotiations over what's going to happen to Ottoman territories in the wake of Ottoman collapse. So he's he's so he's such a vocal part of this and such like so vocally against Sykes Picot that he starts to be seen as a threat from within the military and like within the government of the British Empire. A lot of whom see him as a fame hound

• 16:46Robert Evans?

  because like this is happening while his movie is a big deal. They see him as like he's just some like up junior officer who's gotten way too big for his britches and he's trying to ruin this good thing we've got with France. This horrible war is finally done and we're finally going to get fucking some money, some a place we can plunder, right? To help make up for all of the money we spent on this stupid war we got our country into, right? And this guy is going to fuck it all up, right? Um, now, the Balfour Declaration had been leaked out to the public right around the same time Sykes Picot had been made public. So right at the end of 1917. And some in the British administration during these negotiations in late 1918, 1919,

• 17:29Robert Evans?

  saw the Balfour Declaration, which has a complicated reaction, especially over in, you know, the Arab world, saw it as potentially good news for their support of the Hussains. Because again, Faisal and his dad are wildly unpopular in Syria, right? They're seen as these assholes from Mecca trying to lord over a place they don't belong. And Lawrence's boss in the intelligence services service, one of the masterminds behind the whole Arab revolt, was a brigadier general named Gilbert Clayton. And Gilbert saw the Balfour Declaration as problematic. He's going to be the guy who writes most accurately about why this is a bad idea. But he also is like, this could help us with Faisal, right? And he writes,

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  "Up to date, the Syrian Arab has shown the utmost distaste for any idea of a government in which Meccan patriotism has any influence. Hence, a lack of real sympathy with the Sharif. Fear of the Jew may cause a rapprochement," right? If we if we make it clear that we're going to give the Jews a homeland, the Arabs may get so angry that they decide they line up behind our guy who they're not really happy about right now. But maybe their racism against Jewish people will like convince them, you know, which obviously that's an incredibly racist move from from Clayton, right? Like, we'll just use antisemitism to solve our imperial problems and get our puppet in charge.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  He's pretty classic.

• 18:49Robert Evans?

  It's pretty classic, right? Yeah. Now Sykes himself tried to convince Clayton that the Declaration was a positive for Arab independence, which Clayton, for all of, you know, the racism you see in his writing, really does care about Arab independence. He is one of these guys like Lawrence, who is like, we made promises to these people and we should keep them. Clayton, more than Lawrence, recognizes, because Lawrence kind of gets behind the idea of Zionism eventually. Clayton is always like, this is a bad idea and we shouldn't have done it. But he does get into that, he comes to that conclusion also through a very racist way, by saying that Arabs would be dismayed by knowledge that the Jews, quote, "whose superior intelligence and commercial abilities are feared, would take over in Palestine."

• 19:31Robert Evans?

  In a different letter to Gertrude Bell, the Arab Bureau's Baghdad correspondent, Clayton wrote this, "The Arab of Syria and Palestine sees the Jew with a free hand and the backing of Her Majesty's government and interprets it as meaning the eventual loss of his heritage. Jacob and Esau once more. The Arab is right, and no amount of specious oratory will humbug him in a matter which affects him so vitally. Experience such as I have gained in this war impels me to deprecate strongly and cautious declarations and visionary agreements. We are like men walking through an unknown country in a fog, and it behooves to feel our way and take care with each step we take." And he is not wrong. Yeah, we are, we are men.

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  We shouldn't be doing this, in part because like, obviously this is going to lead to Arabs being displaced from their homes in Palestine, right?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:23Robert Evans?

  Arabs recognize this, they're right to recognize this. And even by by sticking our hands into this mess, we are, we are men walking through an unknown country in a fog. We don't know what we're doing, and so we shouldn't be doing it, right? Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's, that's what the British Empire should have been doing.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  Yes, yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Instead of being an empire.

• 20:45Robert Evans?

  He is, he, again, everyone here is racist, but some of the racists are correct about what's going to happen.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:51Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:53Robert Evans?

  Bell, who also deserves much more coverage than we're giving her. Gertrude Bell was a fascinating character. This woman who had just like traveled alone throughout this huge stretch of the Middle East, become a legitimate expert on the area, really interesting person. Someone who knew Lawrence too, kind of in his early travels, replied that she also hated, quote, Mr. Balfour Zionist pronouncement. But Lawrence, whose instincts for this region and its people were generally much better than this, got caught up in the Zionist cause. And he did so in an interesting way as part of his backing of the Arab cause, right? So during Lawrence's struggle against Sykes Picot in London after the war, he came to see European Zionists as potential allies in the fight for Arab independence.

• 21:36Robert Evans?

  He met with Heim Wiseman, head of the English Zionist Federation, who was willing to back Lawrence's fight for an Arab state so long as Lawrence supported the establishment of a Jewish state. Lawrence, by one account convinced Faisal, by another Faisal is kind of the one who's saying, hey, Lawrence, I, I want you to, you know, make overtures to this guy. But either way, Lawrence and Faisal get on board with Wiseman and the Zionists. And they make an agreement, they actually sign an agreement, right, which if the Zionists support a Faisal-led Arab state based in Syria, Faisal will support European Jews immigrating to Palestine. Now, Faisal does not explicitly embrace a Jewish state, but that was understood to be the result of this.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:17Robert Evans?

  The treaty between the two of them reads, mindful, and this is just fascinating reading, just in light of where we are today. Mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people, and realizing that the surest means of working out the consummation of their national aspirations is through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab state in Palestine. It continues that the Arab state and Palestine should, in all their relations, be controlled by the most cordial goodwill. A commission would be established to lay out boundaries of the Arab state and Palestine, right? And there's a lot there about like, obviously no one will be displaced by this.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Right. It's presenting a two-state solution for Palestine.

• 23:00Robert Evans?

  Not entirely, right? There's an Arab state and then there's Palestine. Palestine is also understood to be encouraging Jewish immigration and seen as a Jewish state. Now, it's not clear, does that mean Arabs and Palestine, like Arabs and, and like European Jews who immigrate and like, you know, like the people like and who live there now, will they be kind of equal partners in a state? That's kind of how I read it is the idea, but it's not a two-state solution. They are always referring to Palestine, right? Like they don't call it Judea or Israel, but yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  To the one-state solution, the like one secular, you can be Jewish or.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that is the closest thing, right? Like the arrangement that they are talking to, when I say that like he supported Zionism, the actual text of the kind of thing he was trying to set up is very different than what exists today, right? I'm going to quote again from that agreement. "All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil. In taking such measures, the Arab peasant and tenant farmers shall be protected in their rights and shall be assisted in forwarding their economic development." It goes on to state that "no interference and free exercise of religion would be permitted,

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  and the Mohammedan holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere shall be under Mohammedan control."

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's presenting a fairly reasonable idea. I mean, like, obviously, like, that's clearly not what large-scale Jewish immigration meant.

• 24:42Robert Evans?

  It's not what's going to happen, but when we say that he's a Zionist, he's not supporting what exists currently, right? Like, that is the result, and he's, it's worthy of criticism. Faisal is worthy of criticism too. And it's important to note that, like, Faisal, this guy seeking to be the king of this Arabic state, is supportive of this measure, right? There's some economic reasons for it, yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  At the very beginning, where he's like, you know, the longstanding appreciation between Arab and Jewish folks. I mean, that's, that is real. And like, there is like, you know, when you study Ottoman Empire before it started falling apart, it's like, well, that's where European Jews went because they were like second-class citizens in the Ottoman Empire, but like. They were.

• 25:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we all know what happened in Russia, right?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:29Robert Evans?

  We all know what happened in Ukraine.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  They were way worse than second-class citizens elsewhere in Europe.

• 25:33Robert Evans?

  Poland, right, yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  When the other thing that happened in 1492 as relates to Spain is that all the Jews were kicked out and forced to convert. You know, and there's just massive immigration into the Ottoman Empire.

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yeah, so this is messy. And obviously, none of this works out the way that Faisal and Lawrence had hoped. While researching this, I've come across several extremely pro-Israel publications, including the Israel Forever Foundation, who published articles trying to remake Lawrence into a hardcore supporter of the modern state of Israel. I found this line in an article they republished from the Jerusalem Post. "You won't find this truth in the lengthy biography of Thomas Edward Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Don't expect to hear about this on the BBC. The world remembers Lawrence as a guide, friend, and champion of Arabs, but hardly knows that he believed in Zionism as it was forced to restore Palestine to its ancient glory, brought about by active British-Jewish-Arab cooperation."

• 26:31Robert Evans?

  And that's not really, like, that is making him into, that is, he is not, nothing that he has described sounds like the modern state of Israel, right? He was not in favor of Palestinians being forced out of their land. Now, we could say that was a foolish thing for him to hope, and he should have known that there was very likely this was going to get ugly, right? But, you know, he winds up doing what he does, right? And a big part of like what he and Faisal are both hoping for is that if we allow Jewish immigration to Palestine, that will bring in a lot of money to this economically depressed area, and it will be good for these Palestinian farmers and peasants, right? That it will, like, a rising tide will kind of lift all boats. That is what they are writing about, right?

• 27:16Robert Evans?

  There were ways it could have worked out differently than it did, right? But, you know, it's also worth noting that Whatever their plans and whatever their hopes for how this works out, Lawrence winds up on the side of what becomes a major calamity for the Middle East, right?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 27:34Robert Evans?

  Is how bloody and brutal everything that results from this eventually is, right?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  And I actually think it's the same problem he has in general, which is that even though he doesn't want England to control these things, he's still on some level, he's more okay with fucking around with England controlling things.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  You know, and so it's like, and that is the same problem that happened with British mandate Palestine. You know, is that, is that the British?

• 28:01Robert Evans?

  We're again, it's like Clayton writes, right? We, we don't know what we're doing. Like, we're going to fuck a bunch of things up because we don't really understand what we're messing around with here.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:11Robert Evans?

  And yeah, like probably just shouldn't have been fucking around with any of this.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:17Robert Evans?

  Maybe a bunch of British guys should not have been making all of these calls.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:22Robert Evans?

  And maybe, and to be fair, a bunch of guys like Faisal, rich guys from Mecca, shouldn't have been making all of these calls, right? Like, none of it works very well. Yeah.

• 28:32Robert Evans?

  Now, I will say for as much, you know, because of what's happening right now, this gets a lot of focus. We're going to inherently think a lot about Lawrence's support of this, of the Balfour Declaration of all this stuff. This probably was not a big part thing on his mind when he thought about like his failures, you know, here in the wake of kind of the, the, the peace agreements and stuff. Because like, nothing happens during his lifetime, right? He dies in 35, right? So none of this like leads to anything while he is around, you know?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's like a couple riots and stuff, but it's not.

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's, there's some riots, you know, there's some stuff that does result from this, but he's probably not super plugged into it, right?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  He is, what really is occupying his mind is he sees the wheeling and dealing in the immediate wake of the war as a fucking calamity for this cause that he cares about. Nearly every piece of the cause that he cared about goes down in flaming failure. The French get their mandate in Syria. The British wind up running much of his imagined Arab state, including Palestine and Iraq. And once it becomes clear that Arabs had fought and won a war of independence, only to wind up ruled by Europeans, the response was bloody as this passage from an article in Smithsonian Magazine makes clear. Lawrence was particularly prescient of Iraq, about Iraq. In 1919, he had predicted full-scale revolt against British rule there by March of 1920, if we don't mend our ways.

• 29:57Robert Evans?

  The result of the uprising in May 1920 was some 10,000 dead, including 1,000 British soldiers and administrators. And man, that's a good prediction, right? He calls March, it happens in May, not bad. Tasked to clean up the debacle was the new British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, who turned for help to the man whose warnings had been spurred, T E Lawrence. At the Cairo Conference in 1921, Lawrence helped to redress some of the wrongs. In the near future, Faisal, deposed by the French in Syria, would be placed on a new throne in British-controlled Iraq. Out of the British buffer state of Transjordan, the nation of Jordan would be created with Faisal's brother Abdullah at its head, right?

• 30:40Robert Evans?

  And obviously, Faisal and his family don't wind up in charge of Iraq for all that long, you know, thanks to our friend of the pod, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. And then Faisal's brother Abdullah, that is still the ruling family in Jordan, right? That's where, that's where that all gets started. Now, the fact that this is the result, right? You know, it's not a total failure. You do have Arab states that are independent, you know, that get, come out as a result of this, but largely, you know, during his lifetime, it's France and Britain kind of calling the shots in a large, a lot of this region. This shatters Lawrence, right? He never really recovers from his failure here. And you know who else has never recovered from their failures?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Uh, is it the casinos?

• 31:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the casinos, they're, they're, they're failure to, to, to give you too much money, right?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  You know, they just can't wait to give you money, right?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Now, they lose money more often than they win. That's why gambling, if you gamble enough, you always win. The house always loses. That's why they say that.

• 31:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. The house always loses. It's always safe, always safe to gamble. Keep your money in a casino, right? It's an investment.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  I mean, if it's controlled by the casino, yeah.

• 31:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  They will succeed.

• 31:58Speaker 04

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• 32:29Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato is right for you. Most HIV pills contain 3 or 4 medicines. Dovato is as effective with just 2. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 32:53Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato 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 Dovato 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.

• 33:28Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872. And... we're back.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Robert, I have terrible news. I followed our advice and now I have no money left.

• 33:44Robert Evans?

  Oh no. Well, maybe you should just put all of your remaining money on black and, and, and just do a, do a shadow roulette. I think that'll fix your problems, Margaret.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the 48.5% chance of success, that's more than 50, so it'll work.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely. So Lawrence is shattered. He's very depressed. He has seen all of his hopes for a better future go down in flames. He's never going to recover from his failure here, or the attendant PTSD as a result of his wartime experiences. And honestly, this is a big part of what makes him a sympathetic figure to me, right?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  But he is not seen that way by a lot of the men who fought for him or his descendants. One of my favorite articles analyzing Lawrence's legacy was that piece in Smithsonian Magazine by Scott Anderson in 2014. He followed in Lawrence's shadow during the early years of the Syrian civil war and interviewed descendants of the Bedouins who'd fought by Lawrence's side. One Sheikh Al Atun of Mudawara in southern Jordan lamented that after the war, the badly damaged Haja's railway was allowed to fall apart entirely, isolating many communities once connected by the imperial project. The partitioning of the Arab world had made the maintenance and rebuilding of such a railway impossible, and there's no real way to conceive of such a project working out and preserving such a complex piece

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  of infrastructure through all of the conflicts that have roiled the area since. Quote, "My grandfather thought that these destructions were a temporary matter because of the war, but they actually became permanent." And you have to remember, this railway had been backed and funded by donations from Muslims in places like the Hajj's because it was, this was their future, right? This would have connected them to the world. And there's no way to keep this going in like these carved up conflicting states that are the ultimate result, right, of the actual, you know, post-war period. And Lawrence had kind of convinced people to blow up this railway and the promise that, and then you'll get a state and we can fix things, right?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  Like, you know, the British, right? And that never happens, right? Now, Lawrence tries, right? How much credit does that get him? You know, maybe not a lot if you're living in the, in the rusting shadow of this dead railway, watching any hope of a better future, you know, fade away, right?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  So they kind of like, you know, in the end, it was better under the Ottomans?

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  No, I think it's a little more complicated than that. Ultimately, when I, when I read kind of analyses of Laura, you know, you can find some good pieces of like Muslim scholars talking about like how Lawrence gets talked about. It's mostly just like, he's not really seen as a major figure in all of this, right? They're more interested in like guys like Faisal. They're more interested even in like British people like Allenby. There were some other, you know, British agents who were moving around like Lawrence, because I think in part of how much attention he gets, has for a long times been kind of like, well, he wasn't really as important as everyone thinks he is, right? Now that is, there's a reappraisal that's going on in, in the present day.

• 36:48Robert Evans?

  And you can find some, some like Muslim historians who are essentially like, yeah, I actually, he actually was a pretty, very significant part. His book is a fairly accurate accounting of things. And he seems to have really tried to do what he thought was best, even though like a lot of it didn't work out. Like there is a reappraisal going on here, in part because modern historiography has found that Lawrence was actually telling the truth about a lot of stuff that he had been kind of believed to be bullshitting about for a while. Now that said, attitudes about him are very complicated over there, right? Now I want to refer back to that, that article in Smithsonian magazine, because later in that article, Sheikh Al Atun says this, "Some people think he was really trying to help

• 37:33Robert Evans?

  the Arabs, but others think it was all a trick, that Lawrence was actually working for the British Empire all along. When I press for his opinion, the Sheikh grows slightly discomfited. May I speak frankly? Maybe some of the very old ones still believe he was a friend of the Arabs, but almost everyone else, we know the truth. Even my grandfather, before he died, he believed he had been tricked." And that's a common attitude towards Lawrence over there. Now it's not universal. His old friend, Emir Faisal, who became king of Iraq, said in 1920 that Lawrence had been truthful in his promises, a matter that made the Arabs trust him. But a lot of people dislike Faisal, right? You know?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I mean, this gets into the like, why I believe so strongly in honesty is that, well, to the people that you're working alongside of, is that you set yourself up for that when you lie to people, even if you're trying to, like, his paternalism, in the end, makes people realize that he was fucking them over, you know, because he didn't treat them as equals and make decisions alongside of them. Because they might have reached the same conclusions. They might have been like, well, cynically, I guess we should side with the British because dynamite and British gold will accomplish everything, you know?

• 38:43Robert Evans?

  Yep. And there's a lot of, like, you could, you could argue, probably maybe part of why Faisal is, you know, so positive, towards Lawrence is that, like, you know, Lawrence is kind of honest with Faisal in a way that maybe he isn't to a lot of these other people, right? These different, because a lot of these, a lot of these Arab tribes that he was getting in line behind the rebellion weren't super pro Faisal, but they were like, well, but we hate the Ottomans, and he's saying it'll work out better, maybe we'll just, like, give it a shot. The rebellion seems to be working pretty well. And then they wind up being like, oh, well, we just kind of got fucked on this, right? We sent our sons to die, and this asshole became a king, but like, what did we get, right?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:27Robert Evans?

  So, after his brief stint with Churchill, Lawrence changed his name and asked to be allowed to re-enlist in the British military, this time as a private. He told a friend that he never wanted to be responsible for anyone or anything significant again for the rest of his life. Like, this is how broken he is, that he's like, I, I don't want any of this fame. I am not going to, I'm going to take a new name and re-enlist as a private, so I just don't have to do anything but follow orders for the rest of my life.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, kill and die, that's

• 39:57Robert Evans?

  Kill and die, sure. I'm fine with that. Literally anything. Like, I've done lots of killing, I'm okay with that. I just can't, like, I have failed so utterly in what were my goals in this thing, right? That I, I just, I don't want to make another decision for the rest of my life.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whoa.

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  So he spent the next, I think, 14 years stationed on a series of small bases around Britain. He lives a quiet, almost solitary life, reading voraciously, listening to music, writing letters to friends, and riding his motorcycle through the countryside. Through this time, the legend of Lawrence grew and grew spurred on by the publication of an edited version of his book, which is, there's a fascinating story here, Margaret, about like, what happens to Lawrence's manuscript here? And this is one of the, there's a great article by Robert New that's just an author's worst nightmare. So Lawrence, he writes while he's like, you know, in the, the start of the 1920s, after all of this had fallen apart, he wants to write his great memoir, which he'd planned for a long time.

• 41:01Robert Evans?

  He'd planned to publish a book called Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Initially, this was going to be based on his, before the war, his travels through the, the Muslim world. And he writes that book and then he destroys it. He gets like anxious about it. He decides it's no good. And before he goes off to war, he destroys the entire book, right? And then he takes the title of that book and he uses it for the book that he writes about his time fighting in this desert war. And he, he, he puts together, using all of his, these notes that he's taken, a 250,000 word manuscript. And then after finishing the manuscript, he destroys his notes. I don't know why. I've never heard a good reason as to like, why does he destroy all of his original notes once he finishes it?

• 41:46Robert Evans?

  But he does, and he only has a single copy of this manuscript. And then when he is at reading station, he leaves it in a bathroom and loses it.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see why every author's worst nightmare. That's a nightmare. Now, I once lost a file of about 35,000 words of a novel.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 42:12Robert Evans?

  What a nightmare.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Oh, that hurt to hear.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  I never finished that book.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  There is debate, Margaret, about this, right?

• 42:26Robert Evans?

  Some biographers, or some people will argue, he probably didn't lose this. He probably, he was so angry about this guy who is, you know, this journalist who has made him into like the center, like a celebrity, right? And he's just so ashamed of what happened that he destroys this manuscript, right? And then like regrets it immediately, right? But that like, maybe that's what happened, right? And he's destroyed a manuscript before, it wouldn't be weird, right? Whatever the case, Lawrence gets back to work, working on a new version of the book. And the second draft of this, which he has to make from memory, since he's destroyed most of his notes, is 400,000 words. And he, he writes this in three months.

• 43:10Robert Evans?

  Which is like, that's like some Stephen King ass shit. I do wonder if, I know cocaine was available over the counter back then. What were you doing, Lore? How do you do 400,000 words in three months? That's nuts.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, what, like 5,000 words a day or something?

• 43:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's an insane rate of, something like that.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I could do that for like three weeks if I had to.

• 43:30Robert Evans?

  And he's unhappy with it, so he throws that out. And then he writes a third version of the book.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Oh my God, so he's on his fourth Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It might as well be called Seven Manuscripts of Wisdom.

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  He almost does write fucking seven.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  The fourth version of this comes in at 335,000 words. And this time, he has the Oxford Times Press print eight copies of it, right? He's not gonna lose this fucking one, right? He sends some of these, and that, this is the text from which we get the final version. And Lawrence would, would kind of regret for the rest of his life. He would say that the first draft was more accurate. Like I fucked up less, like I, I got more of the basic, the nuts and bolts right.

• 44:12Robert Evans?

  Some people will say like, well, it's actually probably much better because in the process of writing a million words of this story over and over again, he got better at writing.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  I'm sure the prose is better, and I'm sure the accuracy is better in the first one.

• 44:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's probably fair to say. And that's like, my God, what a fucking nightmare.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  I know.

• 44:33Robert Evans?

  I would not be able to live with myself.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  But would the first version have helped the Vietnamese defeat?

• 44:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  The first version.

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  Have helped the Vietnamese war strategy, right? Maybe not. I think it's at this point here, like when we talk about all these different versions of the truth and the question of like, how accurate is this, that we get dragged back once again to the question of Lawrence's sexuality, right? One of the key arguments against the rape and deross story is that some of Lawrence's comrades in the tank corps would later claim that he asked them to beat and whip him for sadomasochistic pleasure. Now, there is a lot of reason to doubt these claims. And even if they are true, we could just as easily interpret this as Lawrence working through his trauma as a result of having been gang raped.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  But one piece of evidence to the contrary is that in the original version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's description of his rape was, and this is wild, 200 pages longer than the version that wound up in print, which is

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 45:33Robert Evans?

  a lot.

• 45:36Robert Evans?

  And so some people will be like, this, this kind of reads like he was more putting out a fantasy, right? That's a lot of time to spend talking about yourself being tortured in this kind of like very graphic detail that is, it is tinged with romance, too. Like, it's very, it's an odd bit of writing. Now, that's just the way Lawrence writes. Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, there's a huge difference between romanticizing the bad stuff that happens to you and romanticizing bad stuff in general, right?

• 46:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Like, if the way that you want to process something bad is by romanticizing, being like, at least my life is interesting and beautiful, even though it's terrible and tragic.

• 46:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Like, good on you.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah. So, the journalist that we get these claims, that Lawrence, he's basically writing pornography, right? You know, just because he's so into this stuff, it didn't really happen, is a guy named Philip Knightley. And when I say journalist, you might put some air quotes around this, but he, he reports heavily on Lawrence, right? Like, and he's kind of the origin of a lot of this. And he says, quote, "It was so redolent of the sort of" Sadomasochistic literature that you get in the Charing Cross Road. It sort of cried out that this is Lawrence writing for his own interest in delectation. Right? This, this reads like a lot of the sadomasochistic like smut that was being published at the time. And so that's why I think it's fake. Quote, Lawrence continued these sadomasochistic practices with the help of a man called John Bruce.

• 47:02Robert Evans?

  Bruce was paid to birch Lawrence and then write an account of Lawrence's beating, bearing under the birching. The letters were collected by Lawrence, who read them again and got two kicks for his buck, so to speak. Right? This is Knight's, Knightley's claim, right? Now, the unedited version of the book also points, paints a darker and more self-serving and consciously imperialist picture of Lawrence. In the original text, for example, he describes Faisal as a very weak man, an empty man. You were able to use Faisal to get what you wanted. And is that a more accurate depiction of Lawrence? Or is that just kind of him in a much darker frame of mind after three, writing three versions of this story? Right?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  How do we know what the first one said? Is it because he's later saying?

• 47:45Robert Evans?

  We know what earlier drafts say, right? We have that draft of the 400,000 word one, I think.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Oh, we do have that.

• 47:51Robert Evans?

  I think, I think, I think that's what he's talking about, not the original draft that's lost forever. Or like the 335,000 word one or something like that. Yeah, okay. There, there are earlier, there are earlier, longer drafts than what got published that we have access to. I don't actually know exact, there's so many, so many copies of Seven Pillars floating around, right?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  I admit that if I were to write that and I spent 200 pages describing a thing that happened to me.

• 48:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I could imagine being like, it's time for a third draft.

• 48:18Robert Evans?

  Time for a third draft. I might need to cut this down a little bit.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Kill your darlings.

• 48:22Robert Evans?

  Lawrence, maybe, maybe the torture scene is a little long.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  There's this classic thing with like writing where your first novel, you can't get away with spending eight pages describing stained glass.

• 48:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  But by the time you like, on your like fifth novel and the audience is like.

• 48:38Robert Evans?

  There's a fucking window.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. But by the time you're on your fifth novel, you can spend eight pages talking about stained glass because you already have the, the author buy-in. So Lawrence, your problem was that it was your first book.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  It was your first book, buddy, you know? Well, actually it was, it was like his third through or second or third through like fifth books or something like that.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair.

• 49:01Speaker 04

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• 49:32Robert 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.

• 49:56Speaker 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.

• 50:31Robert Evans?

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

• 50:41Robert Evans?

  Now, Knightley, I should say, who is making this case that Lawrence was an asshole? He was a real imperialist. He was a bad person. He was this masochist who lied about what happened to him. Knightley's not a great source himself. The first articles I found about him that were like, well, there's this guy who says all this bad stuff about Lawrence, described him as a scholar? That's not really who Knightley was. And to describe who this guy is, I want to read a quote from the New York Times. In 1965, Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson, journalists specializing in feature pieces for the London Sunday Times, were assigned to follow up a 60-ish Scotman story that when he was 19 and laureates 33, he was played by, paid by the hero of Arabia to administer periodic beatings.

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  The Lawrence, that Lawrence relished testing his body in other ways was nothing new, but the revelation was clearly of a kind, when stretched into a front page Sunday series to stimulate both reader and newspaper circulation. And by early June of the same year, the sensationally headlined articles began to appear. The shake who made Lawrence love Arabia and how Lawrence of Arabia cracked up a full and exclusive confession from the man who shared his tragic secret. Huh. With the global facilities, established press power and generous pocketbook of the Sunday Times at their disposal, Knightley and Simpson could locate and interview people from Turkey to Australia, pay for information, pry open library doors and foreign office files long locked shut, and do it all in time to meet their newspaper deadlines.

• 52:09Robert Evans?

  So, you know, maybe take this with a grain of salt, some of these things they're claiming, these, these recollections from other people decades later, you know, these guys who are hungry for big stories that they can sensationalize about, you know, T E Lawrence, right?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I just like, don't care if it was like, whether it was a kink or

• 52:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  you know, trauma dealing with, because there's a related anyway, and like, whatever.

• 52:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I'm interested in like, whether or not it happened, right? But like, yeah, I

• 52:37Speaker 01

  I have no moral claim

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Based on it, yeah.

• 52:40Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Now Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence's official's biographer, interprets the original text, or at least what we have of the earlier texts of Seven Pillars, very differently from Knightley. The fact that you have Lawrence being more of a dick, you know, about some of this stuff, as this segment from an article in The Independent makes clear. Wilson said the text shows that Lawrence felt guilty after he encouraged the Arabs to rise up and fight. He knew they would not get an independent state in exchange for their help because France and Britain had other plans. Wilson told BBC Radio 4, when he realized how duplicitous his role was, he became upset about it and went off on a spying mission to Damascus. But the point is, he was hoping to get killed on the way. There is no reference to that in the final Text, but there is an allusion to it in the original texts.

• 53:23Robert Evans?

  So Wilson, who is more of a scholar, certainly than Knightley, is like, well, no, actually, like, the original text includes him kind of talking about how he tried to get himself killed because he felt so bad about what he had done, right? Which does not portray him as like this cold imperialist, right? Just fucking over people, right? And is more a man who did some very immoral things, but was also trapped in this just fucked up situation, right?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  And that's the version that I feel like has been, that I've certainly taken away from this.

• 53:52Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Is the like, the man who always wants to do right and realizes he can't and then feels trapped and like.

• 53:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I think that's probably the closest real to the reality that we're gonna get, right?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  He would have made such a good Catholic, like he wants to get whipped.

• 54:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  He wants forgiveness.

• 54:11Robert Evans?

  He would have been a great monk, right? Like in, if he had come about in the medieval era, he would have been so happy as a monk.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, partly as a result of the war on terror and largely pushed by the work of scholars like Barr and shedding doubt on aspects of Lawrence's narrative, Lawrence saw a reappraisal in the early 21st century that was largely late 90, late 20th, kind of early 21st century, that was largely negative, right? The Arab revolt has regularly been described as a sideshow in World War I, which I really hate to hear whenever people are like, well, actually, it wasn't even that big a deal that any of this went on because one in 10 of the people living in the region died in the fighting, right? Like, this is not a sideshow, this is a major historical event, no matter how you slice it, and it's really fucked up when people argue otherwise.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Sorry if fewer white people were there.

• 54:59Robert Evans?

  Sorry, there weren't as many white people there, right? Lawrence has been described as a braggart, a liar, a fantasist, and a historic reappraisal of the man has to caution against taking this interpretation too far. Again, Barr, who's very properly critical, I would say responsibly in a historical sense, critical of Lawrence, also describes Seven Pillars as essentially accurate, right? And more recent scholars, including the leftist academic Neil Faulkner, have urged a reappraisal of Lawrence as a Titanic figure in world history and that of the region. Now, Margaret, you asked a little earlier, are we going to hear about what like happened to Daum, right? And I, it's time for us to tell that story, which is

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Okay, I know it's a sad one.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. So after Lawrence left the Car, the Carcomish dig site in 1914, the two never met again because during the war, partly as a result of the war, there's a typhus epidemic in Daum's hometown and he dies in 1916.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Oh shit. So he's only like 16 or something.

• 55:59Robert Evans?

  He was, yeah, I think he might've been 18. Yeah. Cause like, he was like 16 when Lawrence left, right? So he was probably like 18. Yeah. But he does not get a long life. You know, this is partly as a result of the war, although not Lawrence's part in it. Lawrence is not an active participant in the fighting until Daum is dead.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:17Robert Evans?

  Now, if you don't find the claims made in Knightley's report incredible and instead take Lawrence at his word and the words that he sent along to close friends, he never had any other kind of intimate relationship, sexual or otherwise in his life. I want to quote now from an article in salon.com by Anthony Satin. In 1927, he wrote to his friend, the homosexual novelist E M Forster, "I'm so funnily made up sexually." And later that same year went further. Having read Forster's ghost story, Dr. Woolocott, in which a man dies after a gay sexual encounter, Lawrence wrote that, "The Turks, as you probably know or have guessed through the reticences of Seven Pillars, did it to me by force. I couldn't ever do it, I believe. The impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature

• 57:01Robert Evans?

  has not yet been born in me." And that is, that kind of sounds like, yeah, like this is someone who

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that man's ace.

• 57:09Robert Evans?

  Ace. That man's very ace, right? Like, "The following year, with Robert Graves, the poet, and at that point, his biographer, he had a discussion about fucking. As I wrote, with some courage, I think, few people admit the damaging ignorance. I haven't ever, and I don't much want to." And that's part of what's so interesting to me is that like, this isn't really some, if we're looking at Lawrence, this isn't something we have to be like wondering about because he, not only does he write about it, he is aware and open to homosexuality. He is talking to his gay friends about his sexuality, which is so interesting to me, so unexpected, right? I really didn't think that we would have him directly talking about like fucking and being like, yeah, I never wanted to do it.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:50Robert Evans?

  That's fascinating to me.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  That's cool because there's so many historical figures that I wish I knew that about, right? Because you're like, oh, why did this woman never have children or get married? Was she gay? Was she ace? Was it just never work out? Like, was she just actually loved dick, but it was, didn't want to marry? Like, who knows? You know?

• 58:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's like with Lawrence, this is as clear as you can get of a figure in this era, talking about asexuality. And probably, I think, the best final source on this is one of Lawrence's homosexual friends, Vivian Richards. And it's like spelled V Y V Y A N. It's a man's name, but I think it's just pronounced Vivian. The two met at Oxford and Vivian is in love. No, I haven't.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Oh, there's a, there's a man named Vivian. Anyway.

• 58:35Robert Evans?

  Well, Vivian is in love with Lawrence, right? Vivian is a homosexual man who has a massive crush on Lawrence. And he was like-

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I could fix him.

• 58:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, horribly sad that Lawrence was never reciprocated. He wrote later, "He had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind. He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as if it was his due. He neither gave the slightest sign that he understood my motives or fathomed my desire. In return for all I offered him, with admittedly ulterior motives, he gave me the purest affection, love and respect that I have ever received from anyone, a love and respect that was spiritual in quality. I realize now that he was sexless, at least that he was unaware of sex." And yeah, that's beautiful.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  That's kind of sweet. And that's like what sometimes like when people who have sexuality who date people who are ace.

• 59:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  You know, might like, oh, well, there's something else that's beautiful about this.

• 59:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And that, that, that's very much what Vivian is saying. I think if Dome had lived and he might have written something similar, right? Like this was never a physical thing, but he was the best in most, most dedicated friend I ever had.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  And this is where we will conclude The Life of Laurence. Margaret, after one of the most action packed first acts in history, the remainder of his military career in existence was not the stuff great movies are made of. The simple reason seems to be that he was just absolutely shattered by war. Laurence's nerves never recovered and in 1935, at age 46, he opted to retire from the military. As he was settling into his new home, he wrote one friend of his discomfort with this situation. "I imagine leaves must feel this way after they have fallen from their tree and until they die. Let's hope that will not be my continuing state. Alas, it was. A week after writing this, Laurence crashed his motorcycle and perished in the accident." And that.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Again.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Which is like.

• 1:00:37Robert Evans?

  Beautiful writer.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like when, um, there's like several really sad musicians who accidentally drown. And you're like, I'll let you have it.

• 1:00:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  I'll let you pretend, I'll let the world pretend that's an accident.

• 1:00:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Laurence accidentally crashed his motorcycle. Okay.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:00:59Robert Evans?

  Whoa. Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  See, I would watch the movie about the second half of his life, but it'd be more like watching The Lighthouse or something.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that, I would as well. Also, I'll be watch The Lighthouse. Great movie.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Robert Evans?

  I think Laurence of Arabia probably would have liked The Lighthouse.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would have been too, he wouldn't have gotten all the masturbation. I didn't get all the masturbation.

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  He would not, not have been a fan of all of the masturbation. Yes, not interested in that.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  I'll make a new edit from me and him.

• 1:01:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, explaining the mermussy to Lawrence of Arabia. If I get my time machine working, I'm gonna go back in time and be like, Lawrence, wait a second before you get on that motorcycle.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  All right, first off, this is a photo of a man named Willem Dafoe. He's gonna be born in a couple of decades. Great actor. Now, I need to explain to you something called a book series called The Twilight Series. This is not your kind of books. There are vampires, which I feel like you might be into, but not in the way that you're into them.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, what a, I didn't, I didn't know the first thing about him. I, I've read about the Ottoman Empire. I've read about British Mandate Palestine. I knew that there was this guy. I never saw Lawrence of Arabia, the movie.

• 1:02:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's great. You should see it. Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  And I think by the time I would have watched it, I would have been like, ah, another movie about a white guy and off to go save the world or whatever.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  And, well, now I wanna watch the movie, but. Yeah, I recommend it.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  No, he's, he's interesting. And it's like, most of the really simple narratives that are around, available for him, don't seem accurate.

• 1:02:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  You know, cuz like, absolutely is Orientalism part of his story, completely.

• 1:02:42Robert Evans?

  For sure, yes.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  And like, but it's, but you can compare his Orientalism to the guy, the like daddy guy who like, wanted to go around the Ottoman Empire or whatever. And then also, you know, he's still doing bad while trying to do good. And, ah, man, he's interesting.

• 1:03:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, fascinating character.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that's Lawrence of Arabia. Well, Margaret?

• 1:03:10Robert Evans?

  You gonna go blow up a train now?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Uh, legally no.

• 1:03:14Robert Evans?

  Legally not.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Is the podcast over?

• 1:03:17Robert Evans?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Uh, go listen to cool people do cool stuff if you like complicated moral stories about people that I kinda like.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, this was kind of that from me. Uh, cause that is, I guess we should answer the question I said we were going to be asking this. Where do you land? Lawrence of Arabia? Bastard? Yes or no?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Uh, bastard in the way that we're all doomed to be.

• 1:03:38Robert Evans?

  Hmm. Yeah, yeah, that might be it.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Uh, you can't go into, you talk all the time on this show about how you can't go into war and come out with your hands clean. And I'm always like, yeah, but I probably could.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  I could do, yeah, I could make it work, yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  I would just, I would just stay morally clean, even if it kills me, whatever.

• 1:03:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  And, and here's someone who wanted to stay morally clean, even though it would kill him. And then he's like, oh, nope, nevermind, I'm just gonna gun down everyone.

• 1:04:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  And so.

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  Time to, time to machine gun hundreds of people.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  So like, he is a bastard. And he's a bastard almost by like accident of birth and like thing he's involved in, rather than like a, a character trait.

• 1:04:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  You know? Like, he's up to some bastardry.

• 1:04:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

• 1:04:24Robert Evans?

  He did his best. Uh.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Anyways.

• 1:04:26Robert Evans?

  But he also probably shouldn't have been doing some of the things he was doing.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Robert Evans?

  It's a mix.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, don't stumble around in the fog in foreign countries.

• 1:04:34Robert Evans?

  Don't stumble around in the fog of a foreign country and, and try to, uh, institute new states. Uh, it, maybe you don't know what you're doing. Maybe that's a bad idea.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Robert Evans?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe there's more wisdom in the prime directive. Not that this is a less advanced, I'm not saying that, but like, just in the idea that like, don't just go sticking your dick in every fucking situation you see, right?

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Robert Evans?

  Maybe the fact that some people are having a war doesn't mean that you need to like, make a call there, right?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Even though you fell in love with one of the people.

• 1:05:07Robert Evans?

  Even though you fell in love with one of them. And even though it is very sweet to say, I'm going to liberate his entire race. Yeah?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Robert Evans?

  Um, it's also pretty fucked up and orientalist to do. So maybe just don't do that. Maybe, maybe just buy him like some chocolates. You know? Maybe chocolates are better than launching a rebellion.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Maybe the ring of power needs to be cast into the fiery pits of Mount Doom.

• 1:05:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes, he is. There is some strong Boromir vibes to T E Lawrence.

• 1:05:39Robert Evans?

  He was Boromir maxing there for a little while.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  I wonder, some of the story about like going across the desert to go get the allies to attack the city. I'm like, did Tolkien read that? And then Aragorn going to go find the like undead army to bring it to bear like.

• 1:05:55Robert Evans?

  Tolkien obviously would say like, no, you know, this is none of it, because that was always his stance, but like, also, like, obviously, World War I influenced what he wrote, and this is part of World War I. This definitely, who definitely takes from this, this is the basis of Doom, right?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Robert Evans?

  Like, this is directly, like, this is not, I'm not, like, going out on a limb here. This is directly what inspires a lot of Doom.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's not really all that hard to see why, you know?

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Robert Evans?

  And it's also, it's interesting, because it shows that Frank Herbert, I think, understood this similarly to we do, to how we do, because Doom is fundamentally about how like, yeah, it's a really bad idea to have this white savior stumble into another culture and just start leading a war. It does not end well. He goes crazy. He commits a shitload of war crimes. He becomes an absolute monster.

• 1:06:48Robert Evans?

  And like, oh, okay, you got it. You really took the right thing out of the T E Lawrence story. Unfortunately, everyone is going to interpret your book wrong for forever, because you made the horrible mistake of doing it, making it all look really cool.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's why I don't write.

• 1:07:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is why I don't write fiction about, for example, anarchist militant characters who are meant to be very complicated and not necessarily good people, but I also like writing about cool people, so they wind up sounding cool, and then people are like, oh, is this guy a good guy? No, no, he's not.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  And for anyone who's curious, they should go read Robert's book, After the Revolution, because that is what that is talking about.

• 1:07:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, a book full of morally compromised people who regret their actions in war.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Just to say, wear sunscreen, drink lots of water, touch grass, and pet a dog if that dog says they want to be petted.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  And if you want to do a moral action that is essentially never wrong, feed people.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Feed people.

• 1:07:47Robert Evans?

  Feed people. Don't blow up bridges. You know what? Honestly, more often than not, blowing up bridges works out badly.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:07:55Robert Evans?

  Don't, don't blow up a bridge, unless you're a hurricane. Then like, that's your business, you know?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Robert Evans?

  Not that I support it, but you know, you have that right, hurricane.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  And if you do want to, if you do want to do a hurricane, just call up Nancy Pelosi because she's got that hurricane on speed dial.

• 1:08:09Robert Evans?

  Oh, I don't know what that's a reference to. I only know about the drink. What the fuck is, what?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  I assume it's about the controlling the weather thing.

• 1:08:16Robert Evans?

  Oh, the, okay.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  I was just doing, um, I've been doing a bunch of episodes about witches recently, and they, they were believed to control the weather. And that was a, it was actually not actually what caused the witch hunts, but a lot of them were, people were like, oh, the witches control the weather. And I'm like, ha, ha, ha, look at you silly, early modern fools thinking people, oh crap, nope, that's happening now.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Anyways, bye.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  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.

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