Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy to continue our series on Lawrence of Arabia.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are the origins of Lawrence of Arabia?
What's murdering my everyones? I'm Robert Evans and right now I'm thinking about murdering everyone because yesterday I got stuck in traffic for Sophie six minutes.
Oh, insufferable.
You drive a giant truck, you shouldn't have to get stuck in traffic. That's exactly what I thought. But every time you drive it over other people, suddenly there's all sorts of crimes that are being committed.
Well, by who?
Uh-huh. Well, by me. Other people. actually i did have a lady back into me yesterday and hit my front end but like it did no damage oh my god i felt so bad she was like sobbing and i was like look ma'am i'm not gonna call the cops like your back bumper is a little cracked but like if you don't want to report this to insurance i don't give a fuck
Also, because the insurance will take her side if she decided it was your fault. Even though she backed into you.
I mean, yeah, I don't think there was much of a chance of that. Like, I was 20 feet back. She just pulled straight out of a parking space. Like, I saw her backing up. I gave her room. She just straight into me. Like, it was like, lady, you had a lot of chances to recognize that you were making a mistake here. But I don't know. I see somebody cry.
One of my favorite things is whenever you see someone get upset because they've hit you and you get to be like, hey, I'm not calling anybody over this. It's such a good feeling.
But one time someone rear-ended me and I was like, look, I'm not calling everyone over like a $20 sensor in the back of my terrible car. And then the kid, it was a teenager, her mom wrote me and was like, great, can I get you to sign something saying that you will not like sue or ask for money later? And I was like, No, if there's paperwork involved, it goes through.
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Chapter 2: How did Lawrence's early experiences shape his views?
Oh no, that part's going to be great. That's the new MAGA is be thou not afraid. Yeah. Are you a MAGA? No, I'm Butna.
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I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the podcast Betrayal. Police Lieutenant Joel Kern used his badge to fool everyone. Most of all, his wife Caroline. He texted, I've ruined our lives. You're going to want to divorce me. How far would he go to cover up what he'd done?
The fact that you lied is absolutely horrific. And quite frankly, I question how many other women are out there that may bring forward allegations in the future.
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
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Chapter 3: What role did the Young Turks play in the Ottoman Empire?
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
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Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarcki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death.
Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life, and much more. All real, completely uncensored.
Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, listeners. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of What Happened to Talena Zar. It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the Arab revolt?
I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason.
I kept just kind of asking everybody, anyone else think this is strange?
You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl.
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Anyway, let's talk about Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah. O-T-E. Okay, but speaking of angels and Lawrence of Arabia, is he particularly religious? Not as an adult. As a kid, he is. As an adult, he's just kind of like vaguely spiritual, but not like particularly religious. I think he's just kind of too much of a thinker to be particularly devout.
And it makes some good sense when you're traveling around in a part of the world that has a different religion than what you were raised in.
He very clearly is not someone who's like, well, all these people are going to hell, right? He does not believe that at all. Yeah.
um through daum and his experience traveling the arab and kurdish regions of the world lawrence began to develop an understanding of the brutality of the ottoman empire as well as its incompetence now during the years leading up to the big dub dub uno there was a general that's world war one for all of you people who hate me every time i do this bit
There was a general sense among Arabs that the Turks were at least their best bet at protection from Western imperialism, right? That like, well, we don't really like being ruled by the Ottomans, but we see what you Westerners are doing to the rest of the world, and we don't want that either. At least these people are Muslim, right?
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Chapter 5: How did Lawrence's relationships influence his actions?
Quote, Hungarian pan-Terranianist activists even go further. They have proposed that the entire Eurasian landmass between Hungary and Norway and Europe to Japan and Korea was once an empire known as Terrania. Apart from non-scholastic websites, no linguistic, anthropological, and archaeological evidence for such an empire exists. Panterranean racialists and historians would beg to differ.
They are impervious to logical explanations, even in the face of hard evidence. I love this shit. Everything was Turks. Yeah. In the ancient past, it was all Turks all the way down. I just love that shit. What a bat shit. Like, no, everything wasn't Turkish. I'm sorry. It wasn't.
That's like, that's like everything was fucking, that's like the Germans being like our, you know, like the root of our, the Aryan race is these guys living in Nepal, you know? Uh, and, and, and also the same as like our dreams of, you know, rebreeding this like Aryan perfect race. I mean, there are Aryans in Nepal, but that's not what Aryan means, you know? Um,
So this belief forms the core of a lot of current fascist theory in Turkey and underpins, for example, the genocidal acts of the Turkish state towards Kurdish rebels in the south and across the board in Rojava. Now, all this is a lot less settled in Lawrence's day. It's just kind of gearing up. But he is watching the early stages of this thing that's going to end in genocide.
And he recognizes this has a bad end, right? Anything like this is going to not end well. And as the Young Turks, one of the ways in which they push these panterranean ideas is by disseminating anti-Arab propaganda.
They are arguing at this point in time that instead of Arabs existing in all these regions, all of them, all of these different peoples are descendants of Genghis Khan, who is the progenitor of the nation. This pisses people off, and there are counter-revolutions starting in 1909, the year before Lawrence goes on his first dig.
Now, that revolution had been sparked by army officers and angry students at a religious school. But the crackdown afterwards bred hatred among locals of Armenian Christians, who they saw as supporting the hated Young Turk government. 30,000 of these Christians were butchered in massacres that would prove an ugly prelude to the looming genocide.
Lawrence arrived in the wake of all this chaos, and while he was living in Ottoman territory in 1911, Italy invaded and conquered Libya. All of this provoked a surge in Arab nationalism, which we should rightly see as not disconnected from the swells of nationalism across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and elsewhere in Europe.
There's a direct line between this Arab revolt that's going to brew and like Serbian nationalism, right? These are all part of like a broader cultural movement around the world. Now, there are two different but not entirely contradictory explanations for what motivated Lawrence ultimately to support an Arab uprising against the Ottomans.
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Chapter 6: What were the implications of World War I on the Middle East?
way of understanding this relationship you're describing yeah it's just interesting because romantic is probably the closest word but there's yeah connotations of that aren't meant that aren't meant and that like make this seem like for one thing is something like much more problematic than i think it was right and man it is just like yeah the whole like i like this guy so much i am going to like free his people from imperial bondage
like personally is pretty cool. I know, with no background as a soldier, as far as I can tell. With no military background at this point, just the experience of like making chain mail and learning how to sword fight with his friends. The SCA is coming to rescue.
Now, in a more artful bit of writing, Lawrence, this is, I want to quote from a poem that Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Islam, which Satine argues is a poem that he is, he doesn't explicitly say this is a poem about Daum, but Satine argues this is a poem written for Daum after Daum's death. Quote, I love you. I loved you.
So I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky and stars. Damn. Jesus. That's a line. That's bars right there.
That is beyond romance. It's like paling.
Yeah. I wrote my will across the sky and stars. He's just a good writer, you know? Yeah. So in this conception, if we take this as the reason why Lawrence ultimately backed the air revolt, and I'll tell you right now, it can't be all of why, right? Yeah. There are less romantic reasons that his country, Great Britain, gets involved.
Obviously, they're not doing it because some random British dude liked an Arab kid. As I noted last episode, the Germans had started making inroads with the Ottomans after the British pulled back their support of the Sultan.
Sik Kaiser, who had thrown away Germany's alliance with Russia because he was a dumb shit, needed the Ottomans because once he's like, fuck you, Russia, he also realizes like, oh my God, there's no one watching our ass, right? Yeah. So we kind of have to have the Ottomans now, right?
And he also, the Kaiser has convinced himself that, well, if I get the Sultan in my back pocket, if we ever have a big fight with Great Britain, I can incite a jihad against the British Empire in India, and that'll solve all my British people problems. Yeah, totally, because Muslims are definitely in power in India and always have been. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. That is a clear fact that you know.
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Chapter 7: How did British strategies affect the Arab leaders?
Now, Lord Kitchener, who is like the king shit of the British military in the period leading up to in the early stages of World War I, is the guy – the man in power in the British military establishment who is first like, hey, I am backing – like I am officially backing that we want to incite an – we're looking into the possibility of inciting an Arab rebellion in Syria. Yeah. Right.
And supporting it enough to create a friendly state that will fracture Ottoman power. Right. Kitchener is like he's not the guy who originates the idea, but he's the first guy in power who's like, I think we should explore this as a potential official like policy move. Right.
It's like, is this the first time? Because this is this is like the US's playbook. Right. Is you back an uprising in order to create a friendly state to the US? Is this like? Are there previous examples?
Oh, yes. From the British, right? I don't think the US is doing much of this. I mean, we've done, you know, you could look into some aspects of our history, but like we get it either way from the Brits, right? They do this in Africa. They do this all over the place.
So it's an existing playbook.
Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely an existing playbook. Right. This is always how the British Empire's playbook is always, you know, although it's usually a bit different because like this is we are trying to disrupt an enemy by doing this.
Usually it's more we have this area we control that we are not native to and we're going to find a warrior people and we're going to both back them, but also kind of incite conflicts between them and other people's. In order to take the pressure off of us, right? But you can see how like that playbook, you can translate that directly to what's being done here with the Ottomans, right?
Well, everyone likes doing that.
The Tsar did that with the Cossacks. Yes, yes. It's a very old playbook, right? So in September of 1913, the coming war between European powers was both something that like everyone knew it was happening, right? That there was some sort of general European conflict probably. And also nobody really expected it to happen, right? Not when it happened, right?
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Chapter 8: What is the legacy of Lawrence of Arabia in modern warfare?
They are carrying out a real historical survey, but that survey is also cover to this group of actual spies that are being sent as assistants, but are there to do their actual spy work. Lawrence is aware of this, and he writes back to his mom, we are obviously meant as red herrings. I love how they could trust the mail so well back then. Oh, of course. Nobody would look in the mail. Yeah.
Now, the trip was mostly uneventful for our purposes, save that it marks the first time Lawrence found himself traveling the Sinai and thinking about the military value of different towns and forts along the way. One morning, he and Wooley were late meeting up with their baggage men because they were hunting a gazelle.
Their camels, which had bolted the night before, were found, and the Egyptian police were contacted in a panic. Lawrence wrote home that, quote, the result was wild telephoning all over the frontier. The Turks were wandering over their hills. About 40 Arabs were arrested and brought in as hostages for our reappearance.
And meanwhile, we were sitting quietly, wondering where in the world our tents had got to. Now, to anyone else, this would just be kind of like a funny moment, but Lawrence, being very perceptive, takes something crucial from the experience. He writes, quote, And this is going to lead him to one of the most important realizations of the last 150 years.
After the expedition, Lawrence and Woolley went back to their dig. Woolley left around June, but as was usual, Lawrence stayed. He got regular pushes to go back home, but in the last 18 months had spent just three weeks in England. Daum and another local friend of his, Hamoudi, had by this point heard stories from Lawrence about home.
And they'd repeatedly asked, hey, we would like to see, you've spent so much time in our home, we would like to see England, right? And eventually, in 1913, in the last summer before the world went mad, Lawrence obliged them. Now they stayed about 10 days. He brings these, these two Arab friends of his, and they stay for 10 days in Oxford. They are mostly treated as like curiosities.
They give like speeches and stuff in public where people get to question them about like their lives in their home. Um, And for the most part, I think it's kind of interesting that this happened, but it's not super relevant to like our question, you know, where do we put this guy morally? There is one anecdote here that I think is worth reciting to you.
And so I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's book, The Young T.E. Lawrence, where he writes about a story that Hamoudi told of this visit after Lawrence's death. Quote, many wish to photograph us, Hamoudi and Daoum, as we sat with him, Lawrence, in our customary clothes. And after they took a picture, they would come and speak to him. And always he said, no, no.
One day I asked why he was always saying no, no. And he laughed and said, I will tell you. These people wish to give you money. But for me, you would now be rich. "'Don't call yourself my friend!' Hamoudi shouted, "'and say thus calmly that you kept me from riches!' It was a rare moment of cultural division between them.
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