Behind the Bastards - Part One: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Robert tells Margaret Killjoy the whole story of Lawrence of Arabia, a British imperialist, hopeless romantic and asexual icon who invented the concept of modern insurgent war. Through it all we ask: was he a bastard? (4 Part Series) https://www.cliohistory.org/thomas-lawrence/lawrence/youth https://www.investigativeproject.org/4256/guest-column-the-final-death-of-lawrence-of-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/02/young-lawrence-a-portrait-of-the-legend-as-a-young-man-review https://www.salon.com/2015/03/01/i%C2%A0realize_now_that_he_was_sexless/ https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/t-e-lawrence-art-war-twenty-first-century/ https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2016/2/16/what-would-t-e-lawrence-do https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-lawrence-arabia-180951857/ https://www.tracesofevil.com/p/blog-page_24.html https://www.firstworldwar.com/features/telawrence.htm https://baklol.com/baks/Misc/Great-people-who-were-also-per-_1492/T--E--Lawrence-_18491 https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/sykes-picot-100-years-middle-east-map/index.html https://stljewishlight.org/top-story/lawrence-of-arabia-or-lawrence-of-zion/ https://theintercept.com/2023/03/23/peter-thiel-jeff-thomas/ https://israelforever.org/programs/balfourinitiative/Implementing_Balfour_Declaration/ https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Implementing-the-Balfour-Declaration https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/manuscript-reveals-dark-side-of-lawrence-of-arabia-s-sex-life-76363.html https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Desert-Fire-T-Lawrence-ebook/dp/B006072QSG  https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/22/archives/the-naked-truth-nothing-withheld-revealed-at-last-the-secret-lives.html https://www.pbs.org/lawrenceofarabia/players/dahoum.html Schneider, James. Guerrilla Leader: T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt (p. 52). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Sattin, Anthony. The Young T. E. Lawrence (pp. 34-35). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cool Zone Media. Ah, 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 it.

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, have you, how do you feel about

bringing back thylacine foxes, which are extinct? That's the Tasmanian tiger, but this company says they've got it figured out, they're gonna be able to clone them. You know, I wish I was more against that kind of stuff than I am, but I'm a little bit on like bring on the dinosaurs chaos Yep, that's I've got I've got a plan for how we can how we can make this work for the Democratic Party Well, Trump probably wants to bring back the Orocs

Yeah, I mean, I honestly I don't mind bringing back the Orocs, but I would focus on the dinosaurs and I think what we do here you know obviously America has a massive problem with guncs, 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 functional laws on that regard. So let's work around the problem, right?

People can't die of gun violence if every American is dying early in a dinosaur park accident. And I honestly think if we rejigger our entire economy around cloning dinosaurs, putting them in parks, and then having those parks kill everyone at the park, we can solve basically all of our current domestic issues, right? You know, nobody's going to be, you know, all of this shit the GOP is going on about

migrants, you know, about trans people. If everyone's just dying to dinosaurs, you know, there's no more problems. We solved every issue in American society. I think it would be good for humanity to not always be the top of the food chain. Yeah. I think it would be good for humanity to not always be the top of the food chain. I think that if, as you were getting ready to go to work, you opened the door and like a rabbit exiting her burrow, you had to look both ways for predators. Because the velociraptors escaped from Disney World again,

like they do every day. Yeah. Yeah. No, okay. I think this is good. I think this solves all of our problems. Like I said, Anderson's dressed as Kendall Roy from succession and I'm very proud of this costume Yeah, who is a baseball if you're watching this you don't know what that is

Kendall Roy's a baseball player with the Dodgers since L to the OG He's the best. He's the best linebacker in the New York Yankees The New York Lakers. Yeah. Oh my god. It's gotta say the New York Yankees. The New York Lakers? Yeah. Oh my God. I just gotta say the New York Yankees, but yes, that's even better. Killing me. Killing me.

Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new True Crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As a kid, I really do remember having these dreams and visions, but you just don't know what is going to come for you. Alicia shares her wisdom on growth, gratitude, and the power of love. I forgive myself. It's okay. Have grace with yourself. You're trying your best and you're gonna figure out the rhythm of this thing. Alicia Keys like you've never heard her before. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been 30 years since the horror began. 9-1-1, what's your emergency?

He said he was gonna kill me! In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to The Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacquees Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series,

Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page-turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey y'all, Nimmini here. I'm the host of a brand new history podcast for kids and families called Historical Records. you get your podcast. tuning into Historical Records. Listen to Historical Records on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Margaret, speaking of the Yankees, you know, that's a 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. I knowth century. Lawrence of Arabia. I know almost nothing about Lawrence of Arabia, but I'm very excited about it.

Excellent, excellent. I've been recently really interested in learning more about the Ottoman Empire. Oh, we'll be talking Ottomans. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Cool. Lotta Ottoman shit is gonna 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 the title of this could be, was Lawrence of Arabia a bastard? And that's a complicated question. He is a guy who the appraisals of him have gone kind of back and forth since his death in 1935 from like, oh, you know, he was this hero 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, 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 were 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? Are you saying that historical people can be morally complex and so black and white? Yes, yes, 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. You know, he is an intelligent. And so he lies to everyone constantly,

his entire life, 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, the 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. I think he'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 our love of the founding fathers and their insurgent struggle from like fucking rebel Alliance, which we all learned about at age like four, you know? 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 the general trend is for people to write him off as like an Orientalist and imperialist. And 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 like, you know, revolution and like, could, you know, some sort of like insurgent left wing movement, you know, take power, you know, defeat the United. 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 go 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. Like that's been going on for fucking ever. That shit was happening when the Romans were around, it happened to the Greeks,

happened to the fucking Alexander the Great's troops when they marched through Afghanistan. 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. 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 that had the backing of other empires. And, you know, that 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 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 Vietnamese and we are not the people who are in charge of our land right now, right? You know, Vietnam's history has a lot of occupation by foreign powers. And the end result of that is that when, right? You know, 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 spirited resistance. Now, one of the leaders of that resistance was a man named Vau 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 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 shit? That's amazing. Yeah. From 1941 to 1972, he was the military commander of the Viet Minh. And he orchestrated the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which forced an end to French occupation of his land. Now, before Dien Bien Phu 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 Vau and the Viet Minh and, you know, the French 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. But 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, The 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 Jiap and Salon's meeting and describes it this way. Toward the end of the meeting, discussion turned towards Jiap's success in resisting the Japanese occupation of Indochina since 1940. Salon wanted to know the source

and inspiration of Jiap's success. Without hesitation, Jiap reached behind his seat and withdrew from a shelf, a heavy book, and laid it before Salon, who recognized the author immediately. Jiap 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, yeah. That is, I mean, that's high praise for your book. Yeah. I hope that one day my book, A Brief History of Ice is the Bible of an insurgent leader destroying French tyranny over their land.

Maybe in France. You'd be destroying something. What the fuck? 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, wow, no, you just like jump some people in the woods. Yeah, you just beat them up in the forest, yeah. Yeah, and like, cause 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,

cause you'll read about the social Democrat nihilist from Russia, Stepniak wrote a book on guerrilla warfare from his time fighting, I actually think fighting the Ottoman empire, but I can't remember. Yeah. You know, but that was- They helped a lot of people figure that one out, yeah. Yeah, and you know, but it's like,

but then that's not the one that people are using. And then you, you know, you fast forward to after World War II, 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 the modern, the story of modern insurgent struggle and the kind of stuff Jiap was doing because Jiap 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 Jiap is showing off his copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in this meeting, T.E. Lawrence is still very famous.

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? And he was famous primarily as this guy who had helped the allies win crucial victories over the Ottomans by we welding these Arab bandits into an effective force. This is as well like partially inaccurate description of his accomplishments, but Jop understood better than Salon what Lawrence had really done. And as a result, Lawrence is kind of puzzled when he hears that Jiap has this copy of Lawrence's book because Salon is like, well, this is just a guy who like taught some desert Arabs

how to ambush trains, right? That has nothing to do 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, Jop replied, is that your assessment of Lawrence? Salon nodded a casual affirmation. Of course, then you have missed the whole point of Lawrence, said Jop. He is less about fighting a guerrilla war than leading one. And leadership, Jop 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 a local culture, I would encourage you to consider there's something worth finding in what Jiap saw in the man. 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. You kind of have to study a guy who can do that. And I will say one of 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 wanna 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 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 gonna tell today. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on August 16th 1888 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 I Missed the gambling ads.

I missed them too. Oh, Chumba. Maybe not by the time this comes out. Yeah, we'll see. No, instead it'll be an ad for guerrilla warfare. Yeah, guerrilla warfare. Disappointed about the election results? One way or the other,

a lot of people are gonna be thinking about guerrilla warfare in the wake of this election coming up in a couple of days. So that's part of why I wrote these episodes. Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind. Who did this and why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where, where the crime happened.

I'm journalist Sloane Glass and I host the new podcast, American Homicide. Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story. On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert,

the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloane Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As a kid, I really do remember having these dreams and visions, but you just don't know what is going to come for you.

Alicia Keys opens up about conquering doubt, learning to trust herself, and leaning into her dreams. I think a lot of times we are built to doubt the possibilities for ourselves. For self-preservation and protection, it was literally that step by step. And so I discovered that that is how we get where we're going. This increment of small, determined moments. Alicia shares her wisdom on growth, gratitude, and the power of love. I forgive myself. It's okay. Like, gratitude and the power of love. I forgive myself.

It's okay. Like grace. Have grace with yourself. You're trying your best and you're gonna figure out the rhythm of this thing. Alicia Keys like you've never heard her before. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911 what's your emergency? or wherever you get your podcasts. We're not done after all. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach

became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended.

But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to the Murder Years, Season 2, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, James Brown, BB King, Miriam Makeba. I shook up the world.

James Brown said, said loud. And the kid said, I'm black and I'm proud. Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa. Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes

and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out. Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. I don't have to be what you want me to be. We all came from the continent of Africa. Listen to Rumble, Ali, Foreman, and the Soul of 74 on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. And we're back. podcasts, check out betteroffline.com. And we're back. So Lawrence was born in maybe the most ridiculously named region of Great Britain, Trinidad, Trimidog, Carnivanshire, Wales, which I know I've pronounced wrong. I don't like, fuck you people. Look at that.

Trimidog, What does that even mean? That sounds like medicine for fleas. Or like if your dog's too fat, you give it trim a dog, right? Like my dog needs to lose some weight. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Excuse me, 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 dog ozimbic, you call it trimadog. Dog ozimbic has to be a thing, right? There's no way that's not coming. I really hope not, but you're probably right. Oh no, there's no way that's not gonna,

there's no way there aren't people who are already shooting ozimbic into their cloned dogs. I love that it's- 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's on Trazadon and hey, so am I. We're Trazza buddies. Oh no, it made it great when I was, I was in a place that was, nevermind, I don't wanna tell you anything about how I acquired some, I've always gone through the proper channels

to get Traza down 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 was 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. 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 this fucked up old timey stuff. Like, oh. This is dad or is this? This is dad. Sir Thomas is Lawrence of Arabia's dad.

Lawrence is the bastard. Sorry,'s dad. Lawrence is the bastard. Sorry, go ahead. 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 wanna 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 gonna keep a small portion of the income so I don't have to ever work a job,

but you get like 90% 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. Now you don't have to have a husband. That seems like a pretty good deal given that this is the 1880s. Yeah. So yeah, given that this is the 1880s. Yeah. 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,

as we all hope to do one day. So T.E. Lawrence was their second son. He was born in Trimidoc, 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 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 force in the relationship. You get the feeling Lawrence's dad is kind of a sad sack and his mom was like, shut the fuck up. You don't have to work.

Chill the fuck out. There's nothing wrong with the fact that we're not married and having kids. Like go fuck yourself. Is she Irish or is she English? I think she's English. Her name is Sarah Lawrence, which does sound like an English name.

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, which like doesn't happen. No, but it's like certain people's dream. Yeah, like stay at home dad, like 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. 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.

They think their dad isn't their dad. Yeah, they think their dad isn't their dad. Now, this is something that 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 things. I'm just a piece of shit. Like I don't belong anywhere. I'm a bad person. I come from nothing. I don't deserve anything. This is like, he's got imposter syndrome his whole life,

despite the fact that he is not just a smart kid, he is clearly a genius. And when I say a genius, I mean that 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. 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. 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. Now this is even for the day, a nerdy hobby, right? Kids are 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 would have gotten way too into like Warhammer or something, right? And I'm gonna 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 shop 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, he's both like, he will destroy any, like he didn't give a fuck about those pews. He will break it and damage church property to get to these goddamn reliefs that he's going to do rubbing's on. This is such a perfect British orientalist style thing to get into.

Like I'm gonna find the history, even if I have to destroy everything between me and it. Yeah, yeah, I will kill him. Yeah, exactly. He's, he has fucking child tomb raider. Yeah. Now Lawrence is, despite his brilliance, an uneven student.

When he was interested in a type, I think today, I don't know what kind of neurodivergent he would be diagnosed as, but maybe 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? And if he wasn't interested in something, he couldn't do the work at all. He was completely non-functional, right? Now he is- 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 Killjoy. 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. And they like- That is literally what I was doing when I was 15. Uh-huh. Yeah, so they're like- Our school had to ban us for 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 chainmail, 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 fair, right? 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 like 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. So they made the case, very bright kid, probably, probably fair to call him a genius. Yeah. The kind of person who's gonna do something really good

or really terrible, as you've pointed out, somehow both. Somehow both, certainly significant. Yeah. 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. Like the most infamous bully academies in history. 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 gonna 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. So Schneider, who's not as detailed as Satin when it comes to dissecting Lawrence's personality in life,

posits that Lawrence's detest 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 awakens 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. But unfortunately he's got to go to college. He attends Jesus College at Oxford. Oxford is what people talk about it 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. 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. 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, you know, 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 like going 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 you know 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 gonna tell you anything about my trip. I'm just gonna 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 gonna talk about that. This, Lawrence of Arabia may low key be our first Behind the Bastards ace icon. not, Margaret. We're gonna 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. 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,

Tiers, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete. They were all there and all within reach of me. I fancy I now know better than Keats what Cortez 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 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. I think for a lot of the Victorian, especially English,

it's kind of like reaching the world of fairy. Like 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. There's 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, right? Like that's how he feels about it. And like that is Orientalism, right? Like that's a factor in Orientalism.

But it's also, when you think about it from the perspective, not of someone of power, but of this like boy who's just been, has this obsessive interest in the history of this era, area, 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 of the like Orientalists like, oh, we're gonna go over there and steal all your mummies and smoke them. And that's like coming from like power and we're gonna go over there and steal all your mummies and smoke them. And that's like coming from like power and we're gonna steal all your stuff. I would smoke a mummy. I would smoke a mummy, Martin. 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 weebness to it. No, no, it's problematic too. But yeah, it's, and he's from the weebs side of things, 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 can move. And that Lawrence excels in. Once that's what school is, he does very well. So Lawrence and his advisor talked themselves into an idea for how he might combine his desire to travel further east, which had been sparked by his first vision of the Greek shoreline and his obsessive interest in medieval architecture. 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, you know, local people in, you know, the Arab world during the Crusades, 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? 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 an episode of Behind the Bastards, a podcast by two people who don't know much

about medieval architecture. But Lawrence, I think the agreement is that he was onto something here, right? And obviously he's not the one who started this idea, other people had proposed it, but he's going to actually contribute significantly to like his story of historical debate in this measure, right?

So Satin writes, quote, Lawrence decided to take a broader view of the topic and to question whether the skill to build a castle, not just a pointy arch, had come from the East. The accepted view, championed at that time by Charles Oman, professor of history at Oxford, was that the Europeans marched East with hardly any understanding of fortifications and learned from the Byzantines how to build the magnificent castles they have left in the Levant. According to Oman, 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. So he decides, I'm going to go to the Middle East to take part, specifically, 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 gonna start that before I go over to Turkey, I'm gonna do a walking tour of Syria. Now he is warned ahead of time, no European does this, right?

It's too hot, it's too dangerous. You'd 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? I'm gonna carry my own shit and like, I'm going to invent backpacking as a hobby. Yeah.

So what years are we talking about here? We are talking 1906. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So he says he's going to do this and his, yeah, his, his advisor's 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, cause he, he, he travels extensively in the middle East. He travels extensively in the Near East, which is more accurate to call Turkey. Um, 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 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, you know, 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 the 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? Now, this does not in fact make him, the way a lot of Europeans take this is 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 or Arab, right? And so they write they both are co-religionists with the caliph and also are oppressed and ruled by the Turks and not happy with it necessarily. Right? You'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're talking about, we're in a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,

very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,java. So anyway, a lot of Europeans assume, oh, this Caliph is like the King of Islam.

And so, we have India, the gem in 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? Which is not like a complete non-factor as a threat,

but they're also vastly overstating the degree of influence the caliph has, right? In fucking India. So this is the status quo for a while. Like we're gonna 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, you know? 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. They're broadly positive about the Trump sneakers though. Right. Aw.

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So we're back. So yeah, the British get the Suez Canal going and suddenly they don't really need the Ottoman Empire to be as stable in order to move goods and services. And 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 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 20, the later 20th century is, is Ottoman territory in this period of time. And so the Russians invade the Balkans and, you know, uh, 1882, uh, or the Russians invade the Balkans and the Brits don't do anything. Then in 1882, the British occupy Egypt. Near the end of the century, Greece and the Ottomans go to war.

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 Wests, 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 Chiroul 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 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- Which means you know that tanky, 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? No Armenians were ever killed by the Turks.

No, no. Anti-Western, anti-imperialist icons, the Turkish Empire. Oh, I know a bit about how the Germans are gonna be involved in the Armenian genocide in a little bit of this story. Z Germans. Yeah, we're not gonna get, 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 the 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 with swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. 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 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, especially that first getting off the plane in Iraq and stepping outside for, it does feel like you've been assaulted suddenly. It's like a violent experience. Is it a dry or is it a hot, 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, Laura Feigl describes his journey. Lawrence wandered around Syria, clad fastidiously in a bespoke suit and hobnail 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, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Not everyone should have it, but the keep calm and carry on while you're being, 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 spent most most of my career reporting alongside British journalists when like you're really In the shit. It's very helpful to have a Brit next to you. They're very good 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 1,100 miles is completely positive.

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. And he is particularly taken by their treatment of him as a guest. He writes home to his father, this is a glorious country for wandering in, for hospitality is something more than a name.

Setting aside the American and English missionaries who take care of me in the most fatherly or motherly way, they have all so far been as good as they can be. There are the common people, each one ready to receive one for a night and allow me to share in their meals and without a thought of payment from a traveler on foot. It is so pleasant for they have a very attractive kind of native dignity." And 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. 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 a very unique experience.

And I'm not surprised he's taken by it. I know exactly how he feels here. And there is this feeling of belonging that's totally different from like Southern hospitality, right, where people will offer you things, but it's kind of rude generally to take them. It's more a matter of like, it's almost sometimes a problem for you,

the degree to which people are offering you meals and hospitality because like you have a schedule to keep. You've got to get places, right? And then- What you're saying is it goes beyond Islam. I know that's a- Oh yes, deeper. Fundamental concept in Islam is taking-

Yes. But it's a fundamental concept in Islam because that was present in the cultures of the region before Islam existed, right? I'm not saying like Islam stole it. I'm saying that like it is the cultures of the region before Islam existed, right? 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.

Right, right. That's interesting. That's cool. 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 poverty together like a nerd. Right, he doesn't feel like he belongs. He feels like a fraud and 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? 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 like 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 archeological 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. Right? That's her description of Lawrence from meeting him. Okay. Now, many descriptions of Lawrence paint this picture of him as almost a monk, the 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, right? 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, you know, some are Arabs, some are Turks,

but 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 Thomson's as Hakim, 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 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? Yeah. 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,

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 archeology 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, I am declaring you a citizen of the state of Texas, Lawrence. Your 10 gallon hat is in the mail. 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 wanna leave when the digging is done. One of his English colleagues later wrote, I never quite fathomed why Lawrence was still at Karkemesh 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, cause 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 young Republican kids. You know? Yeah. No, he just didn't know a better way.

And a big part of it is, it's just much more reasonable to be dressed that way in this part of the world. He is, Karkemiş, he's right on the border of 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 far, it's like not far from,

well actually, no, sorry, it is a little bit, but like, yeah, it's far from Hasika, 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. 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? 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 gonna 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 yearyear-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 Dahoum, 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 Dahoum 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 Daoum 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 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. 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, dome 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 Woolley's allegation is that these two were homosexual lovers and the locals found out about it because he was carving an image of Dome naked in local limestone. Now, again, Dome would have been 15 or 16. And at the time, that is not the same as 15 or 16 today.

Again, in 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 the 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 has 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. If he had been convicted of this, he would have gone to prison. Yeah. What was interesting is because for centuries,

gay men in Britain would go to the Ottoman Empire because it was like more accepted to be gay there and just 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 homophobic, 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, 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 to me. 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 claimed 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 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 Backlull. The article reads- I think we're gonna make a crack.com joke, but no, okay. No, no, no, no, no. I don't know, maybe they stole this from us, I don't know. No, I don't know. Lawrence was very famous for playing Lawrence of Arabia,

pictured here. A great actor, not many know. Lawrence was very famous for playing Lawrence of Arabia. Pictured here, a great actor. Not many know that he was also a great archeologist. I think they're confusing him with Peter O'Toole here. So I think we would have caught that it cracked. Yeah. 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. 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 Karkemi, she 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. Yeah, because if he's friends with gay folks, he would have said it if he was like, no, he's just a stupid boy. 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. Totally. Right? Although he doesn't write about having any particular sexual desires. And in fact, Iain Forster, the gay friend that he wrote to about his own sexuality, seems to have interpreted Lawrence's feelings towards Daum 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 Dahum, 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 Dahum, 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 Jeroblos. In the summer of 1913, the two of them spent most days and evenings together, working at the digs, 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 you know, by this characterization, yeah, they had, they were, they were two people

who had a profound bond, but not a sexual one. And like, why did he carve that sculpture? Well, cause he liked sculptures, right? And he, he was, he, 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 we kind of, we go back in time and say, oh, all of these women were lesbians, like all the ones who just had historically close friends that they lived with as roommates. And it's hard because 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 operate with today. And all I can say is, for one thing, that colleague who initially made the allegations that Lawrence was gay later in life came to me 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 whom he could have been open if they would have seen as a homosexual affair. Was like, I've never had sex and I've never really wanted to.

And that's how Lawrence talks about it. 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're characterizing him today, he's probably asexual, right? And I want to close with a quote by Satin about Lawrence and Daoum. It is impossible to know what Daoum 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 Daoum'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 benefit, well, that's not what Doom says. Doom says he was like a brother. And I think that's probably a better, that's probably the right way to look at this relationship. Wow, okay. 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 more analyzing, right? In a way that- 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? Cause it sounds like your dad liked Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, it may have been, it was also just like that has, 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, cause 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 to a certain degree. So like monks and priests were sort of gay to the Protestants because they like weren't

getting married and having kids. And so I could see- I'm always saying this. There's a version of, you know, queerness, whatever. There's a reason that Ace is in the queer umbrella now. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well. So, that's it, that's the episode.

We did it. We did it, Joe. Magpie, 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. And in which case you can find me there, but just go listen to cool people that 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, do it somewhere, you know? This is gonna sound really weird

depending on what happens next week. 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

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