Part One: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War
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Call zone media. What's... The Dodgers won the World Series. The Dodgers won the World Series. The Dodgers won the World Series. That's not the opening. Anderson's dressed up as a Dodger. I was going to go for... She's not. She's dressed up as Kendall Roy. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert is very disappointed because I had a whole bit planned to do with my guest, Margaret Killjoy. It's a good thing this is a four-parter. Do it next time. Margaret, how do you feel about...

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Yeah, I mean, honestly, I don't mind bringing back the aurochs, but I would focus on the dinosaurs. And I think what we do here, you know, obviously, America has a massive problem with gun violence. But we've already seen from the last like 20 years, it's basically impossible to do much about it. You know, the Supreme Court particularly has come down against any kind of like violence.

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team for all of the rich assholes in America. But before we had the New York Yankees, we had their political equivalent, the British Empire. How do you feel about the British Empire, Magpie? Primarily negative. Primarily negative. Well, I guess that's pretty obvious because they're terrible. Yeah. What do you know about probably like the most famous hero of the British Empire of the 20th century, Lawrence of Arabia? Yeah.

I know almost nothing about Lawrence of Arabia, but I'm very excited about it because I've been recently really interested in learning more about the Ottoman Empire. Oh, we'll be talking Ottomans. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Cool. A lot of a lot of Ottoman shit is going to be going down in this story. So this is, you know, maybe a slightly different kind of behind the bastards episode, because I think like this, the title of this could be was Lawrence of Arabia a bastard?

And that's a complicated question. Uh, he, he is a guy who the appraisals of him have gone kind of back and forth since his death in 1935 from like, uh, Oh, you know, he was, uh, this hero, uh, of the empire and a hero of the Arab people who like backed their liberation from Ottoman tyranny to, he was an agent of imperialism who like betrayed and, you know, uh, uh,

manipulated these Arabs that he claimed to care about and has a lot to do with the modern fucked up state of much of the Middle East and the Muslim world, like a lot of our current, a lot of what's going on in Gaza right now. In fact, does have a lot of direct ties to Lawrence of Arabia.

And then, you know, to today where I think there's another reappraisal going on and you've even got some like left wing scholars who are saying, well, actually, like the really critical views of this guy are not entirely fair. So it's one of those things we'll kind of we'll repeatedly revisit. Like, where do we think this guy's landing? Is this guy a bastard? Is he maybe a cool person or is he kind of somewhere in the middle? Uh.

Are you saying that historical people can be morally complex? Yes. Oh, wow. Absolutely. That would destroy both of our show's concepts, if that were true. And it's also, he's particularly hard to judge because he was a spook, right? He's a spy. He is an intelligent. And so he lies to everyone constantly his entire life. Oftentimes.

Often for good reasons. A lot of his lies are like, well, I would have tried to do the same thing in his situation, right? And then a lot of his lies are like, oh, well, I can see why that, like, the guilt from doing this destroyed your entire life, Lawrence. That was pretty fucked up. So he's a guy, I have always been interested in him because it was my dad's favorite movie. And I'll tell you right now, I rewatched late last year, the Lawrence of Arabia movie from the 60s, whenever it was, holds up.

If you haven't seen it, I really do recommend watching it because it's fucking gorgeous. You know, it was made in an era when if you were going to make a movie about T.E. Lawrence, you sent a bunch of dudes out to the desert and you blew up trains with dynamite. There was no other way to get those shots. And that's pretty cool. Yeah.

I think it's also really relevant because one thing we all share as Americans, you know, whether you're left or right or centrist, is this very strange and somewhat incoherent love for insurgents, even though we also find ourselves constantly fighting and losing wars to insurgents.

And this all, you know, it has its roots in the kind of mythic origin of our nation, the Revolutionary War. But it also has its roots in, you know, I think at this stage we have to acknowledge that George Lucas is as much a founding father of this nation as George Washington. Right. And so, like, you know, it's kind of impossible to separate the our love of the, you know, the founding fathers and their insurgent struggle from like fucking rebel alliance, which we we all learned about at age like four, you know. Yeah.

So we're going to talk about T.E. Lawrence this week. And when I brought Lawrence up in conversations, particularly with friends who are on the left, I noticed that I think the general trend is for people to write him off as like an orientalist and imperialist and, you know, the British Empire's equivalent of the CIA agents who spent most of the 20th century overthrowing democratically elected governments around the world.

And it's fair to view him as all of those things. There's an extent to which all of those are accurate descriptions of the man. But he's also not someone you can ignore if you're on the left, especially if you're one of these people who has ever sat around talking about revolution,

And like, could, you know, some sort of like insurgent left-wing movement, you know, take power, you know, defeat the United States. If any of that is shit that you care about, if you just care about, you know, what's happening over in Gaza, if you're interested at all in how,

asymmetric warfare can topple powerful states, right? You have to study Lawrence of Arabia because in some very important ways he invented like how warfare works in the 21st century. Like he is the guy who created and codified

our modern concept of how an insurgent struggle works. Right. Okay. You know, and that's, people are going to be like, well, that's ridiculous. If you think of an insurgent struggle is just like some dudes who aren't regular soldiers, like ambushing Imperial troops in the desert or whatever. Right. Like that's been going on for, for fucking ever. Right. You know, that shit was happening when the Romans were around and happened to the Greeks.

happened to fucking Alexander the Great's troops when they marched through Afghanistan, right? Yeah. But that's not what modern insurgent warfare means. Modern insurgent warfare is a much more complicated thing that involves the use of insurgent troops

alongside regular national troops in a struggle between empires that takes place over a wide geographical area. Right. Yeah. Um, like, you know, when you look at how, how the, how Vietnam won their war, it wasn't that the Viet Cong just out fought the Americans in the jungles. It was that the Viet Cong participated in a very complex struggle that also involved regular state forces, uh,

that had the backing of other empires. And, you know, that conflict took place not just as a conflict in Vietnam, but as part of a broader conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. And the way that worked was,

was, you know, heavily informed by a lot of the theories that T.E. Lawrence wrote out as a result of what he's doing in the Arab Peninsula during World War I. And to make that case, because I'm sure there's some people being like, what the fuck are you talking about, Robert? That's nonsense. I want to talk, go a little bit ahead of the story, right, before we actually talk about Lawrence's life, to something that happened about a decade after he died in 1946.

Now, this is a story that relates to what would become the Vietnam War. But in 1946, you know, that the Vietnam War, the Indochina conflict, it's not really an armed struggle quite yet. It's still at this point a disagreement over the region of Asia then known as French Indochina.

During the rule of Napoleon III, powerful interests in the French Navy had succeeded in pushing for military control in the region. That had expanded across much of modern Vietnam until their control, France's control, was interrupted by Japan during World War II. Now, if you know anything about Vietnamese history, the Vietnamese people had a long history of identifying as like

We are we are Vietnamese and we are not the people who are in charge of our land right now. Right. Yeah. Vietnam's history has a lot of occupation by foreign powers. And the end result of that is that when Japanese occupiers took over, they met with spirit and resistance. Now, one of the leaders of that resistance was a man named Vo Nguyen Jap.

who by any stretch of the imagination deserves to go down as one of the great military leaders of all time. And you could argue is probably the greatest war leader of the 20th century during his long and storied life, which ended in 2013. I hadn't realized he'd made it so long. Jap led Vietnamese forces to victories against the empire of Japan, France, the United States, and what you could either call a victory or at least a solid draw against China. And like,

who else has that record who else can claim that that's amazing yeah um from 1941 to 1972 he was the military commander of the vietnam uh and he orchestrated the battle of dian ben fu which forced an end to french occupation of his land now before dian benfu in 1946 it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that japan and france were going to fight right

the Vietnamese had helped to oust the Japanese occupier and there were kind of, there were negotiations taking place between Vo and the Viet Minh and, you know, the French occupiers

political and military establishment. And there was at least some hope that maybe a conflict could be avoided. So Vaux sits down in Hanoi in 1946 for a meeting with General Raoul Salon to see if there was a way to work things out peacefully in a manner, you know, Salon at least is like in a manner that still leaves France basically in charge, right? And obviously this was a doomed measure, but they don't necessarily know that at the time.

One of my sources for these episodes is the excellent book Guerrilla Leader by James Schneider, a professor of military theory at the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth. Schneider opens his book with the story of Jopp and Salon's meeting and describes it this way.

Toward the end of the meeting, discussion turned towards Giap's success in resisting the Japanese occupation of Indochina since 1940. Salon wanted to know the source and inspiration of Giap's success. Without hesitation, Giap reached behind his seat and withdrew from a shelf a heavy book and laid it before Salon, who recognized the author immediately. Giap gestured towards the book, saying, My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's seven pillars of wisdom. I am never without it.

That's cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's high praise for your book. Yeah. I hope that one day my book, A Brief History of Vice, is the Bible of an insurgent leader destroying French tyranny over their land. Maybe in France. Maybe destroying something with that book. Yeah, this has taught me to have all of my troops mix tobacco and their own urine together and then make themselves vomit. A key part of modern insurgent struggle. One of the things that I kind of...

When you were saying earlier about how, you know, you think of guerrilla warfare as like, oh no, you just like jump some people in the woods. Yeah, you just beat them up in the forest. Yeah. Yeah. And like, because that's the way that most movies are sort of representing guerrilla warfare because, you know, that's the sexy part of a guerrilla struggle or whatever, right? Yeah. And realizing that there's this like

lineage of development of how, like just like how technology develops, so do tactics and organizational strategies. Oh yeah. And yeah, so realizing that like, because you'll read about

the social Democrat nihilist from Russia, Stepniak wrote a book on guerrilla warfare from his time fighting. I actually think the fighting the Ottoman empire, but I can't remember, you know, but that was, they helped a lot of people figure that one out. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, but it's like, but then that's, that's not the one that people are using. And then you, you know, you fast forward to after world war two, I know a lot of people were writing like, gee, how do partisans work? You know? Yeah.

And so it just, it really interests me that there's development also of just like literally how do you organize this stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and because there had to be, right? Especially because the conflicts of the 20th century are so much wider in scope and more complex and able to be because of the level of development that exists, right? So you need new theories of how to actually wield technology

The story of modern insurgent struggle and the kind of stuff Giap was doing, because Giap is not just a line level guy, right? He is thinking about grander strategy, is how do you wield insurgents as a weapon in concert with the other weapons of a modern state? Totally. That's the question. And that's what Lawrence is kind of a formative scholar on.

Now, at the point in 1946 that Giap is showing off his copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in this meeting, T.E. Lawrence is still very famous, right? He becomes a celebrity as a result of what he does in the Middle East. That's why there's a fucking movie about him, right?

him, right? And he was famous primarily as this guy who had helped the Allies win crucial victories over the Ottomans by welding these Arab bandits into an effective force. This is as well, like, partially an accurate description of his accomplishments. But Giap understood better than Salon what Lawrence had really done. And as a result, Lawrence is kind of puzzled when he hears that Giap has this copy of Lawrence's book, because Salon is like, well, this is just a guy who, like,

Taught some some desert Arabs how to ambush trains right that has nothing to do with with fighting the Japanese in Vietnam why would you consider this relevant and I'm going to continue with another passage from Schneider's book.

Ah, Giap replied, is that your assessment of Lawrence? Salon nodded a casual affirmation. Of course, then you have missed the whole point of Lawrence, said Giap. He is less about fighting a guerrilla war than leading one. And leadership, Giap emphasized, is applicable in any context, desert or jungle, military or civil. And so...

If you're someone who might be inclined to ignore or dismiss Lawrence as just another like imperialist proto CIA guy appropriating, you know, a local culture, I would encourage you to consider there's something worth finding in what Giap saw in the man.

Right. And it's worth studying anyone whose work was a critical part of the strategy that led Vietnam to victory over the United States, because in a lot of ways that gave us the 21st century. Right. You kind of have to study a guy who can do that. And I will say one of like the through lines of the story, we'll be reading some quotes from Separate Pillars of Wisdom.

One of the things that makes Lawrence a powerful insurgent leader, which is part of why I like the story, is that he's an excellent writer. He's just an actually incredibly talented, beautiful prose. And that's a big part of why he is an influential military theorist. And I kind of like that.

That's cool. I want to read Seven Pillars now. It's great. Yeah, it is. It's actually very, very good. And as now historians have gone back and forth on this, but like modern historiography will agree, generally accurate. As we'll talk about, there's a couple of areas where Lawrence probably lied or at least may have lied, but generally accurate to what happened.

So Schneider's book makes a pretty good case for Lawrence as like the father of modern insurgent warfare. My main issue with his book is that he focuses on like the how and a lot of just kind of the military nuts and bolts. And as a result, his story leaves out something that the 1962 movie leaves out, which is why would a guy born into like the comfortable upper middle class of life in the British Empire be

choose to become, you know, a leader, not the leader of an Arab revolt against Ottoman power. Right. How do we get there? And that's the story we're going to tell today. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on August 16th, 1888. Do you want to take an ad before this section? Sure. You know who else was born on August 16th, 1888 in the United Kingdom? Probably not our sponsors because they're probably Donald Trump again. There's a good chance. Yeah.

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And we're back. So Lawrence was born in maybe the most ridiculously named region of Great Britain. Trinadog, Trinadog, Carnivanshire, Wales, which I know I've pronounced wrong. I don't like fuck you people. Look at that. Trinadog. What does that even mean? That sounds like that sounds like medicine for fleas.

Or like if your dog's too fat, you give it Tremadog, right? Is this just like the combination of English and Welsh? Excuse me. I'm sure it is. Do not body shame dogs. Excuse me. I'm not. I'm just saying if you were selling that medicine, like if you're selling Dogozymbic, you call it Tremadog. Dogozymbic has to be a thing, right? There's no way that's not coming.

I really hope not, but you're probably right. There's no way there's no way that's not going to. There's no way that there's no way there aren't people who are already shooting Ozimbic into their cloned dogs. I love that. That's definitely happening. Drugs just go both directions real quick now. Like horse drugs for humans. Yeah.

Oh, I mean, you came over the other day and we're talking about how like Rintra is on Trazodone. Hey, so am I. We're Traza buddies. Oh, no, it made it great when I was in a place that was up. Never mind. I don't want to tell you anything about how I acquired some drugs.

I've always gone through the proper channels to get Trazodone for my dog. I love the proper channels, Margaret. Speaking of the proper channels, Lawrence comes from a line of people who did things through the proper channels. His father was not born a Lawrence. He was instead born a member of the landed nobility, Sir Thomas Chapman.

Now, Lawrence's his family, like Lawrence's ancestors are the literal Irish landlords responsible for like so much of that island's misery. Like when you read about like those like absentee like that's Lawrence's people. Right. That's the line he comes from.

So Lawrence's dad's family, the Chapmans, they send Sir Thomas Lawrence to Eaton where he is abused and molested into being a proper young inheritor of the empire. And he was, by all accounts, a normal boy of the landed nobility until he marries someone who is like a bad match for him, which is not unusual in his social class. But he is not capable of being happy in like a loveless marriage. And also, you know, he's a romantic. Yeah.

He's a romantic and his bride only gives him daughters, right? So he's like also not thrilled about that. So like many men of his social standing, he picks up a mistress and he brings her to Dublin where she gets pregnant with his child.

This child comes out a boy, which is what he had wanted. And he makes the incredibly questionable decision to give his bastard child his name. Right. Hell yeah. Now, it's hard. That's not if you're trying to keep this on the down low, which you're supposed to do. That's a bad way to do it.

This does not lead to a sustainable situation with his other legal family. And everything falls apart for Sir Thomas. And one of the things like there's there's this fucked up old timey stuff. This is dad or is this? This is dad. Sir Thomas is Lawrence of Arabia's dad.

Lawrence is the bastard. Sorry. Lawrence is a bastard, right? So Sir Thomas, what's interesting about him to me, because up until this, like, oh, he's not happy that his legal wife only gave him daughters. So he has a mistress and a secret family. That's not weird. What's weird is that when this gets exposed and his life falls apart, he's just like, fuck it. I don't want to be a nobleman anymore.

I have no attraction to this social circle. So he makes a deal with his wife. You get all the land. You get nearly all of the income. I'm going to keep a small portion of the income so I don't have to ever work a job. But you get like 90 percent of everything. Right. And I'm just not going to be a Chapman anymore. I'm going to disappear and live under a new name and raise my bastard son and live with my mistress who I actually love. Is that cool with you?

And his wife is like, sure. That's a good deal. Yeah. You don't have to have a husband. Seems like a pretty good deal. Given that this is the 1880s. Yeah. Um,

So, yeah, they do this. And Sir John moves out of Ireland to Wales and he takes up a new name with his still a mistress, never legally a wife. And they become known as Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lawrence, even though, again, they're never legally married. So that's where Lawrence's name comes from. It's not his real name. It's the name his dad picks after abandoning his life as a member of the landed nobility to go live with his mistress in Wales. Right.

As we all hope to do one day. So T.E. Lawrence was their second son. He was born in Trimadoc not long after Thomas's old life fell apart. Now, his dad is wracked with guilt over what happened, right? He does seem to feel bad about a lot of aspects of this. Yeah, but his daughters aren't super excited about it. I bet his daughters aren't thrilled. But...

Yeah, Lawrence's mother, Sarah Lawrence, which is very funny that that's her name, was the self, herself, the child of an unwed illegitimate union. So she actually doesn't feel bad about this at all. And she is by far the domineering father.

force in the relationship. Like you get the feeling Lawrence's dad is kind of a sad sack and his mom was like, shut the fuck up. Like you don't have to work. Uh, like good, like chill the fuck out. There's nothing wrong with the fact that we were not married and having kids like, oh, is she Irish or she English? I think she's English. Uh,

Her name is Sarah Lawrence, which does sound like an English name. Yeah. Lawrence would later write that his mom saw their father as, quote, her trophy of power. Lawrence has some mom issues, but also I don't see any reason why this is necessarily wrong. He describes her as a very controlling woman and his father as like kind of a mild person.

Now, one of the things that's really unique about Lawrence's dad, he is in a very – I mean, not just a rarity for the age, but he's almost a singular figure in that he is an attentive full-time father, right? He never has to work, and he has no social obligations to keep up. So he pours all of his interest into being there all of the time to raise his kids. Yeah.

Which like doesn't happen. No, but it's like certain people's dream. Yeah. Like stay at home, dad. Like, yeah. Money is taken care of by inheritance or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he is living a lot of people's dreams and it's just so interesting to me that like Lawrence is like the one guy in 19 in Victorian England who's raised by like a responsible dad, at least responsible to his sons. Yeah.

In the wonderful book, The Young T.E. Lawrence, biographer Anthony Satin writes that Lawrence and his four brothers never, quote, had an unhappy or even an unsettled life. They moved more often in their first few years than most families moved in a lifetime, but they were close-knit and well-loved.

Now, from an early age, their parents don't inform them of their actual lineage of like all everything that went down with dad before they became Lawrence's. But from an early age, T.E. and his brother Ned, they're very smart kids and they have inklings that they might be bastards, although they think for a very different reason. Right. They think that like.

Basically, there was cheating going on between their parents as opposed to the real story, right? They think their dad isn't their dad. Yeah, they think their dad isn't their dad. Now, this is something that like is a trauma to a degree for young Thomas because he and his family, they're very religious. They're raised incredibly strictly in the church and sex out of wedlock is a big deal.

The guilt his father felt, which eventually compelled him to reveal the truth to his sons in a deathbed letter, may have bled over to them in some way. Whatever the truth, Lawrence wrote himself about being dogged by a peculiar sense of worthlessness his whole life, right? This is the way this manifests is he always kinds of thinks, I'm just a piece of shit.

Like, I don't belong anywhere. I'm a bad person. I come from nothing. You know, I don't deserve anything. This is like he's he's got imposter syndrome his whole life, despite the fact that he is he is not just a smart kid. He is clearly a genius. And when I say a genius, I mean that as a small boy, he develops a scholarly fascination and like a professional scholarly level of knowledge of medieval art history.

Uh, in order to indulge this knowledge, he would travel around on foot and through bicycle to different historic sites, either on his own or with a small group of friends to his hobby is to make rubbings of brass reliefs of crusaders and Kings from various tombs and churches. Oh yeah. Like a normal kid, like a normal kid. Yeah. Just a normal kid. Um,

Now, this is even for the day, a nerdy hobby, right? Kids are, you know, reading fucking at least kids of this level of wealth are reading like fucking the Iliad in grade school. But this is nerdy for that day, right? He's trying to do original research on the Iliad.

Yeah, he's doing like original historiography. And Lawrence takes the nerdiness up a notch by developing an obsession with fidelity and completion that modern day like nerd collectors will recognize. This is a kid who in the modern era probably...

Probably would have gotten way too into like Warhammer or something, right? And I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's biography. It was typical of Lawrence that his interest should become obsessive. His principal collaborator, his childhood friend Cyril Beeson, known by his school nickname of Scroggs, remembered that

It was no collector's hobby. There were experiments in the technique of rubbing with different grades of heel ball, a mix of lamp black and wax and paper, assisted by friendly advice from shoemakers and paper hangers whose shops supplied our raw materials. Another school friend described the outings as a ransacking. Nothing stood in Lawrence's way. So if brasses were hidden behind some pews, Lawrence, already ruthless, made short work of the obstruction.

And I still hear the splintering woodwork and his short laugh almost sinister to my timorous ears. So he's both like, he will destroy any, like, he didn't give a fuck about those pews. He will break and damage church property to get to these goddamn reliefs that he's going to do rubbings on.

This is such a perfect British Orientalist style thing to get into. Like I'm going to find the history, even if I have to destroy everything between me and it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. He's he has fucking child Tomb Raider. Yeah. Um,

Now, Lawrence is, despite his brilliance, an uneven student. When he was interested in a topic, I think today, I don't know what kind of neurodivergent he would be diagnosed as, but probably all of them, right? One thing that is written about him is that if he was interested in a topic, he would be so far beyond every other student in the class in that topic. He'd be like at the teacher's level, right? Yeah.

And if he wasn't interested in something, he couldn't do the work at all. He was completely non-functional, right? I can identify with this pretty hard. You're going to identify very hard with the next thing we talk about here because he is – the way to look at him, he is an early iconoclastic example of a nerd, right? He is a proto-geek, right? And he is – I even wrote this in the script, not dissimilar in some ways to our guest for these episodes, Margaret Kiljoy. Right.

And let me make that case now. At age 15, Lawrence leads his friends on raids through Oxford's libraries to learn the secrets of how to make chain mail and other medieval arms and armor for themselves. Yeah, that is literally what I was doing when I was 15. Our school had to ban us from making chain mail.

Yeah, this is what Lawrence is doing as a kid. He's like the very first generation of Western kid doing this, right? They're making their own chain mail, their own weapon. They're teaching themselves how to fight by reading medieval manuals. They learn how to speak appropriate old English and draw heraldry from memory. Like this kid's soul is a Ren Faire, right? Yeah.

And Lawrence is one of those kids. His interest in medieval history is always married with this deep care for the fine details, for fidelity. One of his hobbies, he starts a hobby of like buying shards of pottery from excavations in the city, right? People will be doing construction and they will turn up some old pottery shards.

And his hobby is to buy them and meticulously glue them back together. And he is so good at this as a teenage boy that local Oxford museums still keep and display pieces that he rebuilt from the Roman era. He's that level of skill that even today, his work as a child is recognized as pretty good. He was pretty good at that. Mm-hmm.

So they had made the case, very bright kid, probably, probably fair to call him a genius. Yeah. Um, the kind of person who's going to do something really good or really terrible, right. As you've pointed out somehow, both somehow, both certainly significant. Yeah. Um,

Now, for his own part, Lawrence described his education at Oxford High School with the words very little, very reluctantly and very badly. Right. That's how he talks about his like the end of his primary school education. We can intuit from some details that we do have that he was the recipient of a fair amount of bullying, as you would guess from a child who is gluing together pottery shards. Right.

Like the most infamous bully academy. Yes. At the school for making psychopaths. Yes. He develops as a child, a hatred for bullies that is going to be with him his entire life and that at age 16 spurs him into some disastrous action.

In this particularly notable incident, one of his friends is being picked on by an older kid and Lawrence intervenes. But he is not a large boy, right? This other kid is much bigger. Lawrence intervenes because it's the right thing to do. And the fight goes so badly that his leg is broken enough that he misses a semester in school.

Right. Like he is like rendered an invalid for months because of how badly this kid beats the shit out of him. His mother is convinced that the injury stops him from growing into what should have been his full height. Although that's probably just not biologically true. Yeah. I'm going to quote again from Satin's book here.

The injury exacerbated Lawrence's reluctance to join in. His eldest brother, Bob, remembered that he was good at gymnastics and took part in games in the playground. But Ned admitted that, I've never, since I was able to think, played any game through to the end. At school, they used to stick me in football or cricket teams, and I would always trickle away from the field before the match ended. The obvious reason might have been physical, but Lawrence later thought there were other, more complex issues behind his avoidance of team sports.

because they were organized, because they had rules, because they had results. I find that so interesting. I identify with this. Yeah. So I identify with this so hard that I'm worried. Yeah. It's hard not to. Yeah. Yeah.

So Schneider, who's not as detailed as Satin when it comes to dissecting Lawrence's personality and life, posits that Lawrence's detaste for organized sports has something to do with the fact that he preferred to lead rather than follow.

Now, I think that's probably him working backwards and maybe an error. The quote from Lawrence that Satin presents is a more interesting explanation. They're organized. They have rules. And those rules aren't my rules, right? I don't understand why things are doing this this way. And I don't like just saying, well, this is the way things are done. Yeah.

In the summer of 1905, Lawrence cycled to France with his father. This was not his first taste of freedom. Again, he traveled extensively across the UK on foot and by bike, motivated partly by a desire to get away from his mom. But the trip to France awakened something in him. And for the next several years, he feels this obsession with like, I need to get out there. I need to travel again.

But unfortunately, he's got to go to college. He attends Jesus College at Oxford. Oxford is what people talk about as Oxford, but it's actually like five colleges and Jesus is one of them. Right. I didn't know there was a college called Jesus. There's Jesus College. Yeah.

Is it seminary or is it just called Jesus? It's just called Jesus. I mean, maybe they have a seminary degree, but that's not what he's doing. He's getting an undergraduate degree. He's a history dude. And he hates college. He hates it even more than high school. He hates his undergraduate college.

So he has to find outside ways to stimulate himself. And so in 1906 at age 18, he takes himself alone on a 2,400 mile cycling trip through France and to the Greek coast. Now this is- France doesn't touch Greece. That's a long- That's a long bicycle trip. Yeah. And this is, I think this is his equivalent of, if we're going back to the Margaret comparisons,

Like being a train kid, right? Because he takes this. This is not just about seeing France. It's not just about cycling. It is an exercise in aestheticism. Lawrence wants to see how tough he is. Part of the goal is he eats as little as possible because he wants to explore how little food-

can take me, can I live on while I go in this distance, right? And there's also this intellectual dimension to it. He spends the entire visit, he goes through every medieval church and castle on this route through France to Greece, and he analyzes the architecture in exhausting detail.

And Schneider makes a supposition here that I think is well-founded, which is that he thinks this journey is integral to Lawrence's growth into an insurgent leader because it demanded and it cultured him in physical toughness. And he's also – it's training him how to pay close surgical attention to his environment. And I have trouble like arguing with that contention here. I mean it's like – it's a little bit reading backwards, but it's also not wrong. Yeah, it's not necessarily wrong.

Now, when you string too many details together like that in a podcast, it can make the man, Lawrence, seem kind of like an automaton of history rather than a teenage boy. So one thing I value Satin for is he includes details from this trip like that. Lawrence, while he's starving himself and biking thousands of miles and taking meticulous historical notes about all these castles and churches and stuff –

He's writing his mom letters constantly telling her that he's not going to tell her any details about his journey. All I'm going to tell you, mom, is descriptions of the buildings that I've seen. And he does this so many times that you have to conclude this is him kind of sticking back at his mom because she's so controlling. Like, fuck you, mom. You don't own me. I'm not going to tell you anything about my trip. I'm just going to describe these buildings to you. Like, he's being a little shit. Yeah.

He also probably like fell in love like three separate times on that trip. Yes, yes, yes. Well, maybe not, Margaret. We're going to talk about that. Lawrence of Arabia may low key be our first behind the bastards ace icon. Oh, okay. Yeah, but we're building to that. Or he's a pedophile. One of the two, Margaret. All right, well, let's hope for ace.

Yeah. So Lawrence's journey ends on the Greek coast with a miserable case of malaria. He is also just sick constantly, which I think is just unavoidable if you travel in this period of time. Like if you are a world traveler in the late Victorian era, you are dying of fucking typhus or malaria or something. 80% of your waking hours. Yeah.

But while he's kind of trying to survive malaria, he gets a view across the Aegean of distant Turkey. And this ignites something in him. Later, he would write, I felt that at last I had reached the way to the south and all the glorious east.

Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete. They were all there and all within reach of me. I fancy I now know better than Keats what Cortes felt like, silent upon a peak in Darien. Oh, I must get down here, farther out again. Really, this getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance. I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow.

So he's just the fact that he has to go back to school, go back to England so close to this this world that he's just been reading about all of his classical education and like the Crusades and whatnot. It's like a wound in his soul that he can't just keep traveling.

It's like, I think for a lot of the Victorian, especially English, it's kind of like reaching the world of fairy. Like in the Orientalist mind, you're like, oh, I've discovered the place where none of the rules make sense and I don't belong in this world. So here's this other world. You know, like Byron and all those people were like obsessed with the Near East for that reason, you know? And if you were a nerd in this period, there's not...

Tolkien to fall into. They're certainly not like Star Wars, but you have classic history and medieval history, right? And so this is for him, like if someone today, if you were to just stumble into Middle Earth, like, right? Like that's how he feels about it. And like that is Orientalism, right? Like that's a fact

Right.

There's a degree that you have to be kind of sympathetic to at this stage where it's like, well, yeah, of course he felt this way. Because Orientalism is really complex because you have both the like Orientalist like, oh, we're going to go over there and steal all your mummies and smoke them. And that's like coming from like power and we're going to steal all your stuff. I would smoke a mummy. I would smoke a mummy, Margaret. Yeah, no fair. But there's also just this like...

Well, that's there's this also kind of putting on a pedestal, which is also not always great, but there's like there's a weeb. No, no, it's problematic, too. But yeah, it's he and he's from the weeb side of things. Right. Right.

Now, once he becomes a graduate student, his enjoyment of school improves markedly because the pedagogical style in that part of Oxford, once you hit your graduate era, instead of just being like, you have to learn and memorize these things we say, which is just torture for Lawrence. It's like, hey, what are you interested in? Our job as your advisors is to find the areas of interest you're in and figure out by working with you ways that you can contribute to academia, that you

Yeah.

A major debate at the time centered around the presence of castles built by European crusaders in the Middle East that had structures in common with some of the structures seen in classical medieval European castles. And the question was, does this mean that Europeans introduced certain architectural methods to the Arab world or was it the reverse? Crusaders learned local techniques from local people in the Arab world during the Crusades and

and then took them home with them, right? And so medieval castles are actually in large part an example of knowledge transfer from the Muslim world to the West, right? Right. Which is, I think, largely true. It's agreed. Obviously, like this is the kind of thing that's more complicated than we're going to exhaustively like tease out in an episode of Behind the Bastards, a podcast by two people who don't know much about medieval architecture. Yeah.

But Lawrence – I think the agreement is that he was on to something here, right? And obviously he's not the one who started this idea. Other people have proposed it. But he's going to actually contribute significantly to like historiological debate in this measure, right?

So Satin writes, quote,

According to Orman, much of what Lawrence had admired in France had its origins elsewhere. But neither Orman nor any of the other scholars who had written about this period had traveled to Syria and Palestine to see the buildings, relying instead on historical documents for evidence to support their theories.

Now, this is something that's going to be a thing for Lawrence's whole working life, which is that he's willing to go places other people of his status aren't. And he always prefers to do the most difficult, dangerous version of any task set before him. Right. He is not someone who is like comfortable making inferences or assumptions without actually getting his hands dirty. Right.

So he decides, I'm going to go to the Middle East to take part. Specifically, I'm going to go to Turkey to take part in a dig in some of these classical ruins. And I'm going to start that before I go over to Turkey. I'm going to do a walking tour of Syria.

Now, he is warned ahead of time, no one, no European does this, right? It's too hot. It's too dangerous. You need a guide and servants to carry your luggage and whatnot. And Lawrence is like, no, I'm just going to walk on my own, right?

Right. I'm going to carry my own shit and like I'm going to I'm going to invent backpacking as a hobby. Yeah. What years are we talking about here? We are talking 1906. OK. Yeah. So he says he's going to do this. And his yeah, his his advisor is like Europeans don't walk in Syria. And Lawrence's response is, well, I do.

Which, hard not to like this guy. I know. So he takes his first steps into the Arab world during a fascinating time in relations between his country and the, and again, when I say the Arab world, Syria is the Arab world, obviously. Turkey is not. Turks are not Arabs. I want to be clear that I'm not like conflating the two. I'm going to be using a lot of terms that like,

Because he travels extensively in the Middle East. He travels extensively in the Near East, which is more accurate to call Turkey. Yeah. And he travels. He spends a lot of time both on the Arab Peninsula and in modern day Syria and Iraq. Right. That's all of his like stomping grounds. But at this stage, he's kind of walking through Syria, going through the Holy Land and getting to like kind of the Ottoman heartland. Right. Like that's the that's the the gist of this trip.

And he takes this during a fascinating time in relations between his country and the Ottoman Empire, which was well in decline by the mid-1800s, riven by unrest, and constantly picked at by expansionist czars and quarrelsome Serbs. By 1854, Great Britain had actually come into the Crimean War on the side of the Ottomans, not because like –

Oh, they're being picked on. But because like if the Ottomans fall and Russia extends the Russian empire across like fucking Constantinople, then we don't have a bulwark against this country that we see as a geopolitical rival. Right. You're saying that Western powers need to have an ally in the.

Yes. In the struggle against Russia. Yes. And in this case, it's the Ottomans. The British had another reason for wanting good relations with the Ottomans that's even more selfish, which is that the sultan of the empire – and again, this is a Turk – is the caliph of Islam, right? Right.

Now, this does not, in fact, make him – the way a lot of Europeans take this is that, like, he's the pope of Islam, right? Which is kind of the case but also really not the case in the hearts of most Muslims because, like –

A shitload of the Muslim population are Arab, right? And so they both are co-religionists with the caliph and also are oppressed and ruled by the Turks and not happy with it necessarily, right? We're starting to get kind of more of the rise of Turkish nationalism during this period. Turkish nationalism and Arab nationalism is starting to rise in this period. Oh, I meant to say Arab nationalism. Well, I mean, Turkish nationalism is also a major factor in what's happening, right? But in like opposite directions, right? Because the Arab nationalism is...

Fighting for independence against the Ottoman Empire. And as we'll talk about, the Turkish nationalism is like everyone in this entire wide region of the world are Turks. There are no Arabs. There are no Kurds. You're just mountain Turks who've lost your language, right? Yeah. Which a lot of Turkish people still argue for today. It's kind of a major fact in what's happening in Rojava. Yeah.

So anyway, a lot of Europeans assume, oh, this caliph is like the king of Islam. And so we have India, the gem and the crown of the British Empire with this massive Muslim population, and we have constant issues with uprisings. And if the caliph gets pissed at us, he might call for a jihad from these Indian Muslims. And who knows what will happen then, right? Right.

which is not like a complete non-factor as a threat, but they're also vastly overstating the degree of influence that Khalif has, right? In fucking India. Yeah.

So this is the status quo for a while. Like we're going to keep propping up the Ottoman Empire because of these reasons that are useful for our own empire. But then things start to change in 1869, which is when the Suez Canal opens in Egypt. One reason that the British Empire had needed

the Ottomans to remain semi-stable was that we need them in order to provide us with a way to quickly and easily take goods from the East and the Europe and vice versa, right? Would you say goods and services? Goods and services, right. Speaking of goods and services, you know who else-

takes every product that's sponsored on this show, travels through the Ottoman Empire. Including the podcasts. It's extremely expensive. Yeah, yeah. It's ruining the time stream. We have time cop problems every fucking week. Always trying to bring various weight loss pills and gambling apps through the Ottoman Empire. And how do Ottomans from the 1890s feel about Chumba Casino? They don't love it, Margaret. They don't love Chumba Casino. Yeah.

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So we're back. So, yeah, the British, you know, get the Suez Canal going and suddenly they don't really need the Ottoman Empire to be as stable in order to like move goods and services. Right. And they, you know, they make a shitload of money off the canal. And once they're kind of fatted on canal profits, they stop really caring about the sultan and like propping his bullshit up.

And as a result, the British kind of snooze through another Russian invasion of Ottoman territory. Now, this isn't the Ottoman heartland. It's the Balkans, right? Which you have to remember, much of the Balkans, you know, the territory that becomes like Yugoslavia during the later 20th century is Ottoman territory in this period of time. And so the Russians invade the Balkans and, you know, they're...

1882, or the Russians invade the Balkans and like, you know, the Brits don't do anything. And then in 1882, the British occupy Egypt. Near the end of the century, Greece and the Ottomans go to war and war spreads quickly in this connected world. British colonial figures in India are shocked and horrified when Indian Muslims start demonstrating in support of the Ottoman side of the war. And they take this as, oh, you know, the Caliph, their leader has called them to action.

I think what this actually is, is that like Muslims in India sympathize with their co-religionists in a very natural way in a war against the West. Right. I think that's more accurate than like, ah, the caliph ordered them and they have to follow him.

I want to quote now from a book called Setting the Desert on Fire by James Barr. And this is talking about like European coverage of the war against Greece. At the times, Valentin Chirol believed that the sultan's power as caliph gave him a disturbing and disruptive political influence worldwide. He and others feared that the sultan would use his position to upset the stability of Britain's eastern empire.

Now, this is not how things work out. Like, and this is probably, we know now, probably fair to call this a silly and racist assumption. But you know who else is silly and racist, Margaret? Not our sponsors. The Germans. And, well,

While the British are like, oh my God, what if the Caliph incites a rebellion in India? The Germans are also looking and seeing England as a geopolitical enemy and going, oh my God, what if we could get the Sultan to incite a rebellion in India? Or that could really help us with our British people problem. So the Germans start increasingly sinking resources into making the Ottomans their friends. They send engineers and metal workers to help the Sultan build railways and they send military officers to modernize his army.

And this is, you know, that tanky, if, if tankies existed, then they'd be supporting the Germans because they'd be like, well, at least they're against the British. Anti-imperialist icons, the Kaiser's Germany. Yeah. Yeah. There's no genocide in Namibia. What are you talking about? Yeah.

No Armenians were ever killed by the Turks. No. Anti-Western, anti-imperialist icons, the Turkish Empire. I know a bit about how the Germans are going to be involved in the Armenian genocide in a little bit in this story. Yeah, the Germans. Yeah. We'll be talking a little bit about that. Not enough, but this isn't a story primarily about that. But that is happening, right? This is the situation in the Muslim world when T.E. Lawrence embarks on his first journey there in June of 1909.

A steamer ship takes him to the port of Jeddah in modern day Saudi Arabia. Now, later, during a second landing in Jeddah in 1916, Lawrence writes about the experience of taking the steamer ship to Jeddah. And this is such a beautiful passage that I just have to read it.

When we at last anchored in the outer harbor, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage, which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless.

I like that he clearly cares about living an aesthetic life. Yes, that's everything to him. But also, like you were talking about earlier, how he still wants, I'm sure he's going to fail a whole bunch of times, but he wants to do what's right in any given situation while at the same time, yeah, trying to live a beautiful life regardless of the cost to his health. And that's

That's fascinating. Yeah, it is. And I can tell you just from extensively traveling in this similar region, that description of like the heat, like a drawn sword striking you in the face, I identify with quite a lot. Like that is how it like, especially that first getting off the plane in Iraq and stepping outside for it is, it does feel like you've been assaulted suddenly. It's like a violent experience.

Is it a dry or is it a wet heat? It is a dry heat. Yeah. Yes. From Jeddah, he covered more than 1,100 miles, mostly on foot. In a write-up for The Guardian, Lara Feigl describes his journey. Lawrence wandered around Syria clad fastidiously in a bespoke suit and hobnailed boots. He bemused the natives with his insistence on walking, even when accompanied by guides on horseback. He was especially English in his understated response to hardship.

I've had the delay of four attacks of malaria when I had only reckoned on two, he complained to his mother, informing her nonchalantly that he had been robbed and rather smashed up by a group of armed robbers. Just casually like nearly died of malaria, got beaten by bandits. Anyway, how are you doing, mom?

That is the one, the British characteristic that like, endurance. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Not everyone should have it, but the keep calm and carry on while you're being bought, while you're literally the only nation power of fighting the Nazis. Yeah.

Sometimes you just need the like obnoxious stoicism. Stiff upper lip. I mean, it's part of why I've spent most of my career reporting alongside British journalists when like you're really into shit. It's very helpful to have a Brit next to you. They're very good at that.

Yeah. I can't do a French accent, but yeah. Yeah. They call them a word that sounds like a slur, but it's not. Yeah. So his experience entered the, his experience of this time where he's like nearly dying while walking 1100 miles is completely positive. He is just, he falls madly in love with the local culture with particularly like these Arabs that he's starting to meet as he begins his journey through that portion of the Ottoman empire. Yeah.

And he is particularly taken by their treatment of him as a guest. He writes home to his father,

It is so pleasant for they have a very attractive kind of native dignity. And there's a, you know, there's Orientalism going on in that passage. But this is also something if you travel in this region of the world today, you will experience, which is the treatment of guests, right?

is it's deeper than just Islam. It's something that goes back very far in that region of the world. And it is a profound experience. I don't know how else to describe it, but like the welcome you are in people's homes, people like fighting over hosting you and putting you up through the night. Like it's, it's, uh,

Yeah. Yeah.

you all, it's almost sometimes a problem for you, the degree to which people are offering you meals and hospitality, because like you have, you have a schedule to keep, you've got to get places. Right. Um,

When you say it goes beyond Islam, I know that it's a fundamental concept in Islam. Yes, but it's a fundamental concept in Islam because that was present in the cultures of the region before Islam existed. I'm not saying like Islam stole it. I'm saying that like it is a part of Islam because it's been a part of the culture for much longer. The people who made Islam already had that going on. That's interesting. That's cool. Yeah.

Now, Lawrence seems to have been drawn in part to the feeling of belonging that he felt here because he'd never felt like he belonged at home, in part because he's haunted by his status as an illegitimate child. So part of the appeal here – Yeah, he's bullied everywhere he goes because he glues pottery together like a nerd. Right. He doesn't feel like he belongs. He feels like a fraud, an imposter. He's bullied. And then he goes to this place where everyone's extremely happy to see him and nice to him, and he feels like he has a place to be, right? Yeah.

Now, there's also imperialist impulses, right, that are influenced by his obsession with the Crusades. Schneider writes, quote, Lawrence began to see the Arab world in a new way and would soon come to believe that he could move and bend it to his will, that his crusader musings were more than an adolescent fantasy. We're starting to see some of like the darker side growing as he begins to understand. He also starts to think about how I can manipulate and change things here.

So Lawrence has this first trip and he has a wonderful time. He returns home with his documentation of these different structures he's seen from the Crusades. And he graduates from Oxford, right? He makes several more trips to France to work for the Ashmolean Museum, but he remains obsessed with the East, right? And in late 1910, he succeeds in setting up an apprenticeship at an archaeological dig in Turkey.

To prepare, he traveled to Beirut that Christmas and spent two months in Lebanon being tutored in Arabic. Schneider writes that 60 years later, his Arabic teacher recalled him as someone who, quote, lived rather in the spirit than in the body.

That's her description of Lawrence from meeting him. Now, many descriptions of Lawrence paint this picture of him as almost a monk, this severe aesthetic philosopher type. I think some of that is conscious because he admires these monks who are like a major part of the transmission of the medieval history that is such an obsession to him. That said, he is not one of these guys who's like –

That almost gives you this picture of him as someone who's like unknown and unknowable. That's not him at all. In fact, he is incredibly popular with the local Arab diggers that he meets in – some are Arabs, some are Turks. But like this is like in a rural region of Anatolia, right?

And a lot of these guys, these very like dirt poor diggers really identify with Lawrence because he's not like the other Europeans and that he doesn't just like sit around and wait for other people to do work for him. He digs as hard as anyone else on the team. Right. He's actually useful and he's committed to not just like sitting around while other people do shit. Snyder writes, quote,

A typical example of this aspect of Lawrence's leadership occurred in June. Today I cured a man of compound scorpion bite by a few drops of ammonia. For that, I have a fame above Thompson's as Hakeem, doctor, and as a magician who can conjure devils into water. His role as camp physician would be put to good use, for in June of 1912, a severe outbreak of cholera struck the Aleppo area and saw Lawrence helping the local population deal with the problem through the remainder of the summer.

Lawrence also adopted local garb, dressing in a Kurdish belt and attiring himself like the diggers he'd gotten to know. He found their clothing much more practical than what he'd bought from Oxford, and he wrote of his Western colleagues, "...the foreigners came out here always to teach, whereas they had much better to learn."

You can see why this guy's well-liked, you know? Now, in his book, Setting the Desert on Fire, Barr also gives a much, again, if you want a little bit less of the, like, you know, agent of history moving nobly through time picture, here's a much more fun account of Lawrence's behavior at this time. He injected these excavations with an excitement not usually associated with the world of archaeology by firing his pistol in the air whenever an interesting find was unearthed.

This is also what makes him popular. He loves shooting his gun in the air whenever he's in a good mood. Honorary American. Honorary American. Yeah, you have, we are, I am declaring you a citizen of the state of Texas, Lawrence. Your 10 gallon hat is in the mail.

Now, the digging season is not a year-round thing. Yet Lawrence could always be counted to hang around long after all the other foreigners had left. He just doesn't want to leave when the digging is done. One of his English colleagues later wrote, I never quite fathomed why Lawrence was still at Carchemish when the digs were closed down, but I gather that it was partly from choice and partly from economy.

He used to spend his time wandering around in Arab dress, sometimes for days at a time, storing his phenomenal memory with scraps of local knowledge, which came in very useful later on. When he was not doing this, he was trying to puzzle out the Hittite inscriptions or target shooting with a long Mauser pistol. I amused myself by competing with him at both of these games.

So he's just a fun dude. He likes shooting. He likes puzzling out Hittite inscriptions, you know? Yeah. And he wants to dress like the locals. And he wants to dress like the locals. See where he's... Because when he's walking around in his like suit and hobnail shoes in the desert, you're like, oh man, he's like one of those like young Republican kids. Yeah. You know? No, he just didn't know a better way. And like a big part of it is like it's just much more reasonable to be dressed like

that way in this part of the world. He is Karkhemish. He's right on the border of...

You know, modern day Turkey, like the far southern Turkey and Syria. Right. So this is it's not far from like some of the area. It's not it's like not far from. Well, actually, no, sorry. It is a little bit. But like, yeah, it's far from Hasakah. But like, yeah, so he's right in. You know, this is like the Turks would say part of the Turkish heartland. But this is like the Arab world, the Kurdish world. It's kind of like right in the middle of all of that.

And it's just not a reasonable place to wear a three-piece suit all summer. The garb that the locals wear is much more comfortable, especially if you're digging all day. It's compared to the thing that was developed on a terrible island where the sun never rises. Yeah, in hell itself. That's why they want an empire where the sun never sets is because they live on an island where it doesn't rise. Yeah, exactly.

So Lawrence was to spend the next three years of his life in Turkey as much as possible. This was, by every credible account, the happiest period of his life. And it is also where we get the first claims that he was a bastard. Right.

Right. Specifically, the claim that he was a pedophile or some sort of groomer. Right. Now, I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't agree with this interpretation, but I'm going to make the I'm going to make the case for it. I'm going to explain to you why people talk about this. So the gist of it is that while Lawrence was participating in this dig, a 14 year old boy named Salim Ahmed was hired on as a donkey boy.

In the parlance of the times, this means he helped lead donkey trains of supplies to the diggers. Salim, nicknamed Dahum, or the Little Dark One by his fellows, became fast friends with Lawrence. We don't know precisely why, but their bond deepened when Lawrence caught dysentery later that year, and Dahum cared for him until he got better.

The two traveled to Aleppo together and Lawrence began promoting his young friend to higher positions and ultimately made Daum his assistant. While on the dig, the two lived in the same house and seemed to take particular pleasure in wearing each other's clothes. This is something that everyone will say about them is like they would exchange outfits and dress like each other.

They have pictures taken where they're dressed in identical outfits, like dressed as each other. And by all accounts, they are inseparable. Right. And again, this is like I think he's 14, you know, to 16 during like the period where they're spending most of their time together. And Lawrence is in his 20s. So this is potentially very problematic. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson described Lawrence as having a quote, almost fatherly concern for the boy. One of his colleagues at the dig, Leonard Woolley, went much further. After Lawrence became famous, he made public allegations that Lawrence had convinced quote, "domed to live with him and got him to pose as a model for a queer crouching figure which he carved in the soft local limestone."

To make an image was bad enough in this way, but to portray a naked figure was proof to them, the local Arabs of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence was widely spread and firmly believed. So Willie's allegation is that these two were, were homosexual lovers. And like the locals found out about it because he was carving an image of dome in local naked and local limestone. Now, again, dome would have been 15 or 16. Um,

And at the time, that is not the same as 15 or 16 today. Again, unlike Germany, you're an adult at 14. But I don't say that to mitigate potential pedophilia, just to say like that is why his countrymen who criticize him for who like he was homosexual. They're not calling him a pedophile because that's not how they would have seen this. Right. They would have seen this as a gay relationship. That's not how we see it.

I don't think we're wrong in seeing it differently, but he is not written about by people who criticize him as his time as a pedophile. He's written about as a homosexual, which is a severe criminal offense in the UK at the time. Right. If he had been convicted of this, he would have gone to prison. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because for centuries, gay men in Britain would go to the Ottoman Empire because it was like more accepted to be gay there. Yes.

a friendlier place. But obviously, I think that that started to fade around this time. Actually, I've heard because of Western influence, but I'm not, I've been more certain about things. It's a bit more, it's too complicated for us to get into in detail. But one aspect of this that I think was an aspect of why it was friendlier in the Ottoman Empire, and it's an aspect of how everyone looks at it and how, like Lawrence is famous, he's not home

Right. He has friends who are gay that he knows are gay and he does not seem to have any issue with this. But also, I don't know that he would have. I don't think he had any kind of sexual relationship with Doom to like skip ahead here. But I don't know that he would have felt that was wrong because he would have looked at it in the way that like.

He saw in the way like ancient Greeks had these relationships between older men and their younger wards. Right. That is probably how he would have seen it. Right. That makes sense. That said, that's not what I think is going on here. Now, there are allegations later in his career from adult colleagues in the army who claim that Lawrence asked them to whip him.

Right. And so these have kind of been merged in the public mind with some of these rumors that he and doom had a sexual relationship. And a good example of how this like comes down in casual history is a, a, a, a,

A quote from a very bad listicle I found called Great People Who Were Also Perverts, which I found on this terrible shitty clickbait website called Backlol. I thought you were going to make a crack.com joke, but no. No, no, no, no, no. I don't know. Maybe they stole this from us. I don't know. I don't know. Lawrence was very famous for playing Lawrence of Arabia, pictured here. A great actor. Not many know that he was also a great archaeologist. I think they're confusing him with Peter O'Toole here. So I think we would have caught that at Cracked.

It was said that Lawrence didn't go much for relationships at all. Then suddenly he fell in love with a young boy who was underage. He also loved to be whipped hard on his backside, so definitely had strong leanings towards masochism. A pedophile and a masochist is a far cry from the over-glamorized image people have of him as a great actor. Do you not know? Lawrence was a real... He's not Peter O'Toole. I don't think Peter O'Toole was a pedophile. What? Like... Okay. Anyway...

I like the name actor, that this is a separate person. You have some serious misconceptions about the history here. Now, a different article I found on a better website, cleohistory.org, made the equally confusing decision to ignore the particulars of Dahome's age and depict his relationship with Lawrence as more of a thwarted gay love affair.

Quote, while at Carchemish, he formed a particularly close bond with a handsome young Arab water boy whom Lawrence once took on a long visit to Oxford. However, given the reticences of the time, it seems impossible to finally get a clear picture of Lawrence's romantic life.

Now, I'm going to skip to the end here and say there's no evidence that Lawrence had sex with Daum or that he even wanted to. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that Lawrence ever chose to engage in sexual activity with any person over the course of his entire life. Anthony Satin writes, Lawrence said he never had a sexual relationship, and most people who knew him found that credible.

Because if he's friends with gay folks, he would have said it if he was like, no, I used to sleep with boys. And he does. He describes himself in a letter to a friend of his who was gay and who he knew was gay as this is Lawrence describing himself funnily made up sexually. And from the context, we can see two things. He was aware of homosexuality and not judgmental of it. And he did not consider himself gay or straight.

And I think probably the best term that fits for him is asexual, right? Now, this is not an orientation that is well understood even today. And we shouldn't assume that he would have talked about his sexuality the way modern day ace people talk about it, right? This is 1911. And asexuality is pretty much non-existent in the public consciousness, right? He probably would have thought of his own sexuality more like he thinks of like a monk, someone who has taken a vow of celibacy, right? Although he doesn't write about having any particular sexual desires, right?

And in fact, E.M. Forster, the gay friend that he wrote to about his own sexuality, seems to have interpreted Lawrence's feelings towards Dahome as an unconsummated love affair. But I think that's Forster kind of pushing some of his own sexuality onto Lawrence, right?

Lawrence describes himself as kind of celibate. He writes repeatedly about his love for Daum, but in a matter more complicated than just like fatherly affection, but also not in a way that sounds like lust to me. And here's Satin again.

Ten years later, when Lawrence referred to his friendship with Daum, he talked of it as one in which there was such intimacy and mutual understanding that they had said all two people could say to each other. This freed them to work or rest together for hours without speaking. Lawrence experienced that sense of calm and trust with very few people in his life. It was not obvious that one of them would be a donkey boy from Jarablas.

In the summer of 1913, the two of them spent most days and evenings together, working at the dig, swimming in the Euphrates, cleaning and drawing, photographing and cataloging the finds in the courtyard or a large sitting room of the expedition house, even while Lawrence was busy writing of his adventures in Seven Pillars of Islam.

And by this characterization, yeah, they were two people who had a profound bond, but not a sexual one. And why did he carve that sculpture? Well, because he liked sculptures, right? And he was raised on sculptures of the naked human form that he didn't see as sexual, because this is not a guy who particularly had any sexual feeling, probably, right? It's interesting because-

I was talking to my sister about this one time and we were talking about the whole historically close friends thing and how like, you know, we kind of, we go back in time and say like, oh, all of these women were lesbians. Like all the ones who like just had historically close friends that they lived with as roommates. And it's hard because we, we just actually don't know in most circumstances. Like sometimes we do, we have like professions of sexual love between the two, but like sometimes historically close friends were just historically close friends in a way that

Also doesn't map to any current understanding of sexuality that we know we operate with today. And all I can say is, you know, for one thing, that that colleague who initially made the allegations that Lawrence was gay later in life came to be like, actually, I think it's probably likely that he never had any kind of sexual feelings towards Dahum.

And Lawrence in his own letters to his friends with, with whom he could have been open if he had what they would have seen as a homosexual affair. It was like, I've never had sex and I've never really wanted to. And that's how Lawrence talks about it right now. Lawrence is not a perfectly reliable narrator, but I just don't see any reason he would have lied about this. I think he was probably, if we were, if we're characterizing him today, uh,

He's probably asexual, right? And I want to close with a quote by Satin about Lawrence and Daum. It is impossible to know what Daum thought of these changes to his life. He was obviously flattered that Lawrence was taking an interest in him, while the extra money and new status helped set him apart in the village. A range of possibilities was opening through his growing ability to read and write Arabic, but only occasionally can we hear Daum's voice with any clarity. One moment was at Ibn Wardani,

But the most persuasive was his answer to Miss Farida's question in the summer of 1912 of why he loved Lawrence. He did so, he replied, because Lawrence was brother, friend, and leader, because he could do things better than them, because he was courageous, playful, humorous, and perhaps more important to them because they knew he cared for them.

And I think that that, if you're looking for like, is he a pedophile? Well, that's not what Doom says. Doom says he was like a brother. And I think that's probably a better, much, that's probably the right way to look at this relationship.

Wow. OK. Anyway, so far, the only way in which he's a bastard is in a literal sense. Yeah, he's a bastard, literally a little bit. He does some orientalizing, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, but like not in a way that would earn him an episode here. He's probably not a pedophile, kind of maybe an ace icon. Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, I had always my dad had always told me when we would watch the movie together that he had been gay. And I've come to find that like there's not really any evidence for that.

Like he was cool with gay people, but like there's not really any evidence that he was gay. Do you think that was your dad like trying to be chill about a gay person? Because it sounds like your dad liked Lawrence. Yeah, it may have been. It was also just like that. That was the understanding, the common understanding. And I think that still is. I think most people would still say, oh, he was gay, right? Like I think that is still how most people think of this.

I mean, in a weird way also, because I've been reading a whole bunch recently about some of the early Protestant ideas around sexuality and not making kids and not getting married is all sort of equally gay. Yeah. To a certain degree. So like monks and priests were sort of

gay to the Protestants because they weren't having weren't getting married and having kids. Yeah. You know, and so I could see I'm always saying this. There's a version of, you know, queerness, whatever that there's a reason that Ace is in the queer umbrella now. You know? Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, so that's it. That's the episode. All right. We did it, Joe. Mac, do you have anything you want to plug?

Well, if you like history about complicated people who mostly aren't bad, then I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which is on this little known network called Cool Zone Media. And you can listen to it. And it's probably too late to catch me on tour when you're listening to this. But maybe...

Maybe it's not. Maybe I'll be on a different tour by the time you hear this. Yeah. In which case, you can find me there. But just go listen to cool people who did cool stuff. Listen to cool people who did cool stuff. And you know...

Launch an insurgent war. I don't care against you. Do it somewhere, you know? This is going to sound really weird depending on what happens next week. Yeah, yeah. That's my advice to you. No matter where you are in the world, go start some shit, you know? Or don't. Or don't. Legally don't.

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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