Part 1 is here.
T. E. Lawrence thought of himself as a great expert on the Arabs, and he managed to convince others to share in that belief. And he met a felt need, in Great Britain in the 1920s, after the Great War, for a hero, and a hero on a horse, whose heroism took place far from the trenches that one would wish to forget. That made him even more attractive. And his myth was also helped along, across the Atlantic, by the entrepreneurial Lowell Thomas, who proceeded to market books and short, traveloguish films, about "Lawrence of Arabia," flogging his wares everywhere.
Let's remember that Lawrence's achievement, such as it was, was merely one based on gold. The Arabs he dealt with did not flock to the Allied side. Almost all of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire remained quiescent, to the very end of World War I, content to accept, or fearful of not accepting, their Turkish overlords. But there were some, a few, under the Sharifians (the family that controlled, or was the custodian of, the Two Noble Sanctuaries, Mecca and Medina), who came to the Allies after years of cajoling, and especially after they finally saw, by late in 1916, which way the war appeared to be going. They were further persuaded by what some cynical British called the "cavalry of St. George" - that is, the bags of gold that Lawrence distributed. (The "bags-of-gold" method was used by the British often, as the best way to rent temporary Arab support - even the famous crosser of the Empty Quarter, Mr. Shakespeare, found bags of gold sovereigns the best implementer of policy among the Al-Saud.)
It is in Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written at the end of his life, in 1935, that he records his exploits most fully. And it is Seven Pillars of Wisdom that, along with his "Twenty-Seven Articles" (written in 1918) turns out to have been, according to a new article by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, so influential among assorted colonels, headquartered in Leavenworth, for Lessons Applicable To Today's Iraq (Afghanistan, Pakistan, name your exotic Muslim poison). Before dealing, then, with the "Twenty-Seven Articles," it makes sense to take a look at Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which so many consider to have been Lawrence's final summing-up, and his masterpiece.
Now it's not hard to grasp the appeal of Lawrence for many today, especially if they do not know much about him. Imagine yourself an officer in the American military, having to endure repeated tours in Iraq, or possibly now in Afghanistan. The mysterious Muslim East, with its camels, and muezzins, and those cloths you wrap around your face to protect against sun and sand. East is there; the East is exotic. Many of the people you meet are well versed in pleasing foreigners who may bear gifts (military hardware, money). And besides, poverty itself (as exhibited by, for example, Afghan tribesmen) is itself enough to win you, for you are at heart a sentimentalist, uninclined to ask just what it is about the local population that makes for, even guarantees, such poverty. If you are, or like to think of yourself, as of a scholarly bent, you may start with Byron's "The Road To Oxiana" or Doughty's "Arabia Deserta," or Fitzroy Maclean's accounts of Central Asia. The verities of the desert, the endless dunes, the stars seen unhindered by man-made lights in the sky above, the camels, the sandstorms, the headdress.
And then there are all those points of Arab or Muslim etiquette to master: how to enter a tent, how to accept an invitation for a meal, even if the meal is sheeps' eyes, how to respond to a request, how to parry a question about religion, and so on. And if you are like the rest of us, you might well sink into this stuff, and as you master it - it's not very hard - think that you have acquired some important skill. And the more you learn about this kind of thing, the more you think the task you have been assigned - to win those hearts and minds for your cause - is important, cannot possibly be trivial or even a distraction. You forget, or never bother to think about, the larger question - of how, say, what you have been asked to do in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, will affect the worldwide threat that Muslims, that Islam, pose to all non-Muslims. You do not think about what is happening in the countries of Western Europe, or of how the temporary rental of cooperation from Sunni Arabs in Anbar Province could possibly make the Muslim threat in, say, Great Britain, less worrisome.
No, you are dedicated entirely to the immediate task that has been assigned you. And the more you study for that task, and the more you convince yourself that you have some special knowledge and that you will, as a consequence, "make a difference" in Anbar Province, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, the more likely it is that you will become an unwitting collaborator in a collective folly - the folly of how we now choose not to exploit the fissures that can be found within the Camp of Islam, the folly of trying to pour development money into these places on the theory that "poverty" and "lack of jobs" is the real explanation for the popularity of the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or any of a hundred other groups (Lashker-e-Toiba, Lashkar Jihad, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Sunna al-Islam, Hizballah, Hamas, and so on). It's the line from the song about Officer Krupke in "West Side Story": "We're depraved on account of we're deprived." No one mentions the ideology of Islam, no one sees the elephant that is in the room, or rather, no one notices that the very air is suffused with the attitudes of Islam, the attitude of deep mistrust, and permanent hostility - not to be overcome by any acts of generosity or kindness, which in Islam are already seen as part of the sinister Infidel plot to woo good Muslims away from Islam.
And so the farce continues, the farce in which American and other Infidel aid is poured in to Muslim lands in order to make Muslim peoples less poor, to make their countries less wretched, to somehow - even in the presence of Islam - make them better so that they will be, we think, less of a threat. Was the threat that the Saudis posed to all Infidels greater when they did not have the fabulous riches they now have? Now that everyone in Saudi Arabia is "prosperous" thanks to oil, is the threat posed by the Saudis greater, or smaller, than it was, say, fifty years ago? What about Iran? What about the other Muslim oil-states - has "prosperity" made them better friends, or at least less hostile, or at least so distracted by their wealth that they have no time to pursue Jihad all over the world?
For some American policymakers, outside it is still 1948. America is the only country standing, and it is we who will send money to the countries of Western Europe, build and fund NATO, give aid whenever it is asked. In fact, for the past sixty years, the easiest thing in the world for foreign countries has been to inveigle the Americans into emptying their pockets. And the theory is always that "poverty" is always and everywhere the cause of hostility, and that if we can only end that "poverty" we shall end the hostility.
The logic of this is particularly bizarre when it comes to Islam. We all agree that there are many poor countries, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Latin America. But these countries are not Muslim, and for some reason their people are not full of murderous hostility toward us and toward others they call "Infidels." So we don't pay too much attention to them. Instead, we are now lavishing hundreds of billions in aid on Muslim lands. Eventually the non-Muslim poor will figure this out, and perhaps many of their peoples will start converting to Islam, so that the Americans will think they have to shell out money to keep these people from becoming "hostile." What is particularly absurd about the American effort is that when Muslims are poor, when they have to lead a hardscrabble existence and have no time, and no means, to conduct Jihad, they are relatively harmless. Afghan villagers without television and computers and radios to whip them up against the Infidels, who must farm or raid to keep alive, are not the threat to us that Saudi and other rich Arabs are, than the government of Libya is, than the Islamic Republic of Iran is. Think of Iran fifty years ago, or Libya. Were these countries "prosperous"? No. Did they constitute a danger to us anything like what they constitute today?
No.
Furthermore, the attempt to pretend that "poverty" is the problem, and not the ideology of Islam, delays the day of recognition by Infidels of the true basis of Muslim hostility toward us (Islam itself), wastes a tremendous amount of resources (two trillion dollars have been spent, or committed to be spent, on the Iraq folly), and allows Muslims who could be made aware that the reason Muslim states that do not possess oil will remain poor (and even oil-rich states have failed to create economies not based completely on oil) is that Islam itself, with its inculcated hatred of bid'a, innovation, and its discouragement of hard work because of widespread inshallah-fatalism, is the reason for poverty in the Muslim lands. Why should we, the Infidels, keep transferring our own wealth, and allow Muslims not to recognize the source of their economic stasis?
Which brings us back to General Petraeus, and Colonel Nagl, and Colonel Crane, and Colonel Kilcullen, and others. They did not fashion the policy in Iraq. They did not decide to go to war. They were all handed a task, and they performed the task they were assigned splendidly, but the very excellence of their execution may have caused them to avoid thinking about the larger picture into which the war in Iraq must fit. That larger pictures has to do with what, really, one is attempting to achieve. Why should we wish the sectarian and ethnic fissures in Iraq to lessen? Why do we have a stake in preventing, for example, co-religionists of the Sunnis in Iraq from sending money, materiel, and men, to help the Sunnis against the Shi'a (so despised by the Saudis, and the Egyptians, and the Jordanians), who refuse for some reason to give the Sunni Arabs what they had grown accustomed to, and what they want still? Why is dividing and demoralizing the Camp of Islam not a goal that makes sense, while the goal assigned to General Petraeus and his men does not make sense? Should they not have at some point begun to think about the Islamic penetration, through use of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and unchecked demographic conquest, in the historic heart of the West, the countries of Western Europe? Too much fixation on a task at hand in Anbar Province can be geopolitically fatal.
And one wonders if those who came up with general laws to be applied to "all insurgencies" had any idea of what an absurdity that is, as absurd as someone stating, after solemn study, that "civil wars, in general, last 3.7 years." This is useless as a statistic, but not more useless than such a statement as "on average, insurgencies last about ten years." "On average"? And what constitutes an "insurgency" in Iraq? Is it Al Qaeda in Iraq against the Americans? Is it Moqtada al-Sadr's men against the Americans? Is it the Dawa Party and the SCIRI Party militias fighting the Sunnis? Is it the Kurds fighting the Arabs in Mosul? Is it the Sunni tribes, receiving American pay and weapons, fighting - for their own purposes - al Qaeda in Iraq? There are a dozen different armed conflicts, or conflicts that have military aspects, in Iraq, and the temporary alliances can shift overnight. The Anbar Sunnis, or many of them, are now showing that they never were the friends of the Americans, and a moment's thought would have made that clear to those who said, uncritically, that "the surge worked."
It is disturbing to think that American military men would ever take Lawrence, he "of Arabia," as an authority to study and revere. Lawrence of Arabia was a mythomane (a congenital liar, who took pleasure in lying), whose military exploits were minor - "his Arabs" did not take Damascus, and "his Arabs" did not even dislodge the Turks from the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway at Medina, where a Turkish garrison remained throughout the war, and held out even after the war. What they did, in harrying the Hejaz railway, was militarily insignificant, as General Allenby and others knew; the taking of Aqaba, too, was hardly as important as Lawrence allowed himself to believe.
One wonders if some of those entranced with Lawrence's supposed wisdom are themselves not entirely immune from a desire to see themselves as akin to him, or him as they imagine him, at understanding the exotics -- those Arab tribesmen - among whom they have come to create their own local versions of an "Arab Revolt." After Aldington, Kedourie, Kelly, and many other scholars long ago exploded the Lawrentian myth, we have a right to expect that our own military leaders would have known about Lawrence, and even if they did enjoy the movie by David Lean, would have enjoyed it only for the romantic fable it is.
In his Inaugural Lecture delivered in 1967, at the University of Wisconsin, where he had just been appointed as the Professor of British Imperial History, J. B. Kelly discusses "the frauds and deceptions practiced by Lawrence in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and the "stylized murkiness of its prose." Kelly asks where the romantic notions, the sentimentalism about the Arabs and other Eastern peoples, came from - he mentions Lady Hester Stanhope - and he discusses the vein of sentimentality that could be discerned, not only in the "amateurs and romantics," but, under a thin veneer, in the minds of supposedly "practical-minded" men who also exhibited, bizarrely, a "reverence for Muslim institutions."
Lawrence went out to the Middle East as "a temporary subaltern, unknown and undistinguished, but harbouring large ambitions in a small frame, a yearning, as he himself put it in the Seven Pillars, 'to do a thing of himself,...a thing so clean as to be his own.' Lawrence found his 'thing' in the Arab revolt, and from the moment that he was fortuitously dispatched to the Hijaz on a minor errand he bent the whole of his energies and all of his peculiar talents towards making the revolt his own. Since he could not make it that - there were too many other, and weightier figures, involved - he used his genius for self-advertisement to make it seem his own, being reckless of, and even taking a perverted satisfaction in, the injustice he was doing the other British and the Arab officers who fought with the Sharifian forces....Lawrence postured and intrigued on his Arabian stage, flattered and indulged by his masters and mentors in Cairo...."
And there is much more in that vein. Kelly is not impressed with Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the slightest, and he quotes contemptuously:
Lawrence coyly recalls in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" that in September 1918 he made a "saucy threat" to Allenby that he would take Damascus without waiting upon permission to do so. The only drawback to what Lawrence conceived of as an engaging piece of impudence was that the Sharifian forces were incapable of taking Damascus. The Turkish army stood in the way. The road to Damascus was not opened until Allenby defeated the Turks at Megiddo on 18 September. Even then General Barrow's Indian division still had to roll up the remnants of the fourth army east of the Jordan.
As was noted in "Arabia Petraea, or General Petraeus' Middle East (Pt. 1)," it was the Australians who took Damascus, and had the city surrendered to them. But, Kelly notes, "later that day the Sharifian forces entered in triumphant procession, of which Lawrence has left a lyrical description in 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom.' He left out, of course, the bit about the Arabs slaughtering the patients in the hospital, and of course the bit about his standing outside the hospital while the slaughter was going on inside, unhinged, giggling."
And there is more about
Now the process of the suppression of the truth began, and worse. Not content with blurring and misshaping the story in "Seven Pillars," Lawrence proceeded to calumniate the Australians, saying that he had begged Sir Harry Chauvel, the commander of the mounted division, to keep his men outside the city that night, "because tonight would see such carnival as the town had not held for six hundred years, and its hospitality might pervert their discipline." He then displayed his pique that Chauvel would not salute the Sharifian flag, now flying over the town hall ("I wanted to make faces at his folly"), and at Chauvel's intention to "march through" and not "enter" the city. "It meant," Lawrence writes, in a tone which he thinks of as schoolboy merriment but which emerges as mere petulance, "it meant that instead of going in the middle he would go at the head, or instead of the head, the middle. I forgot, or did not well hear, which: for I should not have cared if he had crawled under or flown over his troops, or split himself to march both sides."In the next few pages [of Seven Pillars of Wisdom] Lawrence casts aspersions upon the Australians' conduct, discipline, and humanity, dwells upon his own tireless efforts to restore the amenities of Damascus, enlarges upon the tenderness with which he ministered to the wounded Turkish prisoners, and casually mentions, en passant, that a little fighting broke out. With a scornful rebuke for the press correspondents for sending alarming reports of the disorder to Allenby, he laughingly tells how he "accepted" - not that they were needed - an "offer" of troops from Chauvel. Now the truth of all this is very different. The Sharifian forces had begun fighting with the adherents of Faisal's rivals among the Syrian politicians, Turkish prisoners were being butchered, the Bedouin were looting, and Lawrence, for all his claimed spiritual affinity with them, for all his prowess and courage of which they were said to stand in awe, could exert no control over them. It is doubtful if he even tried to do so: Sir Alec Kirkbride, who is now the sole survivor of the band of officers who fought with the Sharifian army, has recounted how Lawrence seemed to have gone into a trance, incapable of word or deed, while K. himself stalked the streets of Damascus with the Australians, revolver in hand, shooting the looters.
It is the measure of the influence of Lawrence's friends that his version of the capture of Damascus gained immediate circulation, not merely after the "Seven Pillars" was made public in 1935 but almost immediately after the event. It could not have gone unchallenged as long as it did - for forty years - had not the creation of the myth served the purposes of others (one must recall the period when Lawrenciana was at its height: the late thirties, in Palestine). It is equally the measure of their determination and unscrupulousness that the perpetuators of the myth, public and private, were quite prepared that this, offensive and perverted version should continue to circulate as long as it did - offensive because it besmirched the character of the Australians, perverted because it subordinated the honor of the many to the cheap glorification of the few.
Lawrence himself, as with so many of the incidents in which he was involved, is the worst of witnesses, as a consequence of his habit of blurring the sharp and uncomfortable outlines of reality with swirling gusts of flaccid prose. The account of his meeting with Allenby in Damascus comes on the penultimate page of the "Seven Pillars": "Mistily I realized that the harsh days of my solitary battling had passed. The lone hand had won against the world's odds, and I might let my limbs relax in this dreamlike confidence and decision and kindness which were Allenby." There follows a cursory description of Allenby's meeting with Faisal and then suddenly, as sudden as Lawrence's departure from Damascus, are at the end of the book:
"When Feisal had gone, I made to Allenby the last (and also I think the first) request I ever made him for myself - leave to go away. For a while he would not have it; but I reasoned, reminding him of his year-old promise, and pointing out how much easier the New Law would be if my spur were absent from the people. In the end he agreed; and then at once I knew how much I was sorry." There is no question here of the warrior-scholar flinging aside his pen, wearied to the point of collapse by the effort of recounting so much that which tormented his mind and his spirit in the immediate past, of recoiling from the horror of war and things best forgotten. The book had too many literary godfathers for that; too many hands, Bernard Shaw's, Robert Graves's, David Garnett's, and others', helped shape the mannered gaucherie of its style. If the book ends abruptly it is not merely to put a merciful end to this dreary flow of disguised rodomontade. After all, its editors considered it a masterpiece, and took a justified pride in their handiwork. As Bernard Shaw said, in reviewing it in the Spectator," (and who better to say it?): "There is a magical brilliance about it,...a Miltonic gloom and grandeur....It is one of the great histories of the world...by an author who has reached the human limit of literary genius and who has packed in to the forepart of his life an adventure of epic bulk and intensity." No, if the literary editors and executors of Lawrence, men who have expended millions of windy words in praise and explanation and extenuation of him, have not seen fit to say more about the manner in which Lawrence left Damascus and Allenby, it cannot be out of a decent reticence. There are things that have to be left unsaid if the mystery is to retain its power.
Kelly quotes, in this lecture, from a brief epilogue that Lawrence appended to Seven Pillars, evidently intended as a coda to the mighty and sonorous movements which precede it, the closing lines of which run: "There remained historical ambition, insubstantial as a motive by itself. I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Baghdad; and then there was Yemen. Fantasies these will see, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort."
Isn't this grandiosity, for himself, but for himself in the context of re-making a world, a "new Asia" where Mecca would lead to Damascus, Damascus to Anatolia, and then to Baghdad, and "then there was Yemen" exactly the kind of thing that one should be wary of, something one should deplore? Isn't it akin in its own way to the messianic sentimentalism of the Bush Administration that went to war in Iraq in order to "re-make" Iraq, to create a Light Unto the Muslim Nations? Aren't all these grand schemes, or even schemes less grand, deplorable -- as in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where we now hear that there are plans afoot for large numbers of American civilians to remain to "re-make" as much as they can of these places, even after the military withdraw? (That the civilians will not possibly be able to exist safely without a large military presence appears to be one more of those obvious things that keeps being - like Islam itself - overlooked.) Only later did Bush discover that it was most unlikely 1) that Iraq could be re-made as a liberal Western democracy or anything close to one; and 2) that any Sunni Arab state would never take as its model an Arab state where the Sunnis had been forced by events to give up power to the mistrusted, and often despised Shi'a.
Yes, there are "lessons" to be drawn from Lawrence's Seven Pillars, all right, but they are not exactly the lessons he intended to draw. They are things we can learn not to do, and one of those things is to avoid grand schemes, or people who enjoy going native, and thinking they are using the locals, when it should be obvious to all that the locals, in the case of the Sharifians, were all along using him. (My, how Lawrence's Arabs made out like bandits, not only during but then after the War.) They did little, and received much during the war. And after the war? Well, what about the Emirate of Transjordan? What about the kingdom of Iraq? How's that, just for a start? The Sharifians did not do so badly, did they, in addition to all that gold and all those rifles?
Kelly quotes one last passage from Seven Pillars, in which Lawrence appears to briefly recognize his own illusions:
"A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs, Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again."
The belief that the Arabs of Iraq, or the Afghans of Afghanistan, or many in Pakistan, can be battered and twisted, or bribed and bribed, to become like us, or that we should, in our dealings with them, "imitate them" and then possibly be fooled as they, in turn, "spuriously imitate us" (a variant on the Gunga Din problem, of our sympathetic identification with a handful of locals, forgetting all the rest), is something to be guarded soberly against. But the American government has squandered, and is squandering, money, men and materiel, and shows no signs of pulling back. It cannot, its upper ranks cannot, begin to grasp the ideology of Islam. And so the waste continues, continues and kills.
I have quoted at length from Kelly's unpublished lecture because there was no point in putting his own perfectly expressed analysis in words less precise and less telling. But I see I have spent an essay's worth of your time not, as previously promised, on the "Twenty-Seven Articles," but almost entirely on Seven Pillars.
But there's a reason for that. And the reason is that, along with the "Twenty-Seven Articles," another work that General Petraeus has apparently been recommending to one and all as some kind of guide to their mission in Iraq is Lawrence's Seven Pillars.
Kelly has described the "the frauds and deceptions practiced by Lawrence in the 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom'" and the "stylized murkiness of its prose." He has shown, in detail, especially in Lawrence's account of the taking of Damascus (Sir Harry Chauvel, the Sharifians, the massacre at the hospital, the encounter with Allenby, the dismissal of Lawrence by Allenby), just how meretricious, unreliable, and self-serving, Lawrence was. It is not surprising that the general public is unaware of this; for them, the myth of Lawrence remains as it was back in the mid-1930s or mid-1920s. But General Petraeus, and his collaborating colonels, are readers, and one expects that they would at the very least have been repelled by that "stylized murkiness," and that some faint hint of Lawrence's mythomania would have reached them.
Apparently it has not.
And now, given the space and time devoted to the Seven Pillars, I will deal with the "Twenty-Seven Questions" that, along with the Seven Pillars, are said to have been so influential among some in the American military, in what was to have been a second, but will now constitute a third, and final, part.
Excellent analysis, Hugh, of the vacuous conditions of America's "war on terror" which translates into a pseudo "war on poverty" -- ala 1960's style to win the hearts and minds of Islamics who are inherently poor -- except those who are nouveau riche and hell bent upon dominating the world with their barbaric 7th century cult of Allah-Sharia. It appears the military top guys are not getting it. Islamic wealth in any form is used for their prime directive to dominate the world for Islam, and not to relieve poverty.
In your part on the military brass:
"Which brings us back to General Petraeus, and Colonel Nagl, and Colonel Crane, and Colonel Kilcullen, and others. They did not fashion the policy in Iraq. They did not decide to go to war. They were all handed a task, and they performed the task they were assigned splendidly, but the very excellence of their execution may have caused them to avoid thinking about the larger picture into which the war in Iraq must fit."
Yes, they were "handed a task" as military men are expected to do, and they are excellent at it. But they operate from within a vacuum in handling their task, if they do not understand deeply what this "war of terror" against the civilized West is all about, and what its source is coming from. We of JW understand it implicitly that it stems from the Koran and Hadiths, the imams and mullahs spouting Islamic supremacy over the whole world for their cult of Allah. But do the military top guns get this? It is not a war on poverty, boys and girls. Not even a war against the imams who spout hatred of our free way of life, our envied civilizational achievements. It is a war on Islamic Jihad. They declared war on us. That is the larger picture, but their hands are tied by failing to name the enemy: It's the Islam.
The dangerous myth of T.E. Lawrence continues.
For instance, in Britain at present, Rory Stewart is presenting a 2-hour BBC TV programme: 'The Legacy of Lawrence'.*
There are some wonderful visual images in the programme of the Lawrence trail (e.g. Petra); and Stewart emphasises how Lawrence came to understand detailed aspects of Arab culture.
But, as Hugh points out, Lawrence's understanding of Arab culture was crucially weakened by the failure to understand the nature of Islam. (And so it is with Stewart's TV programme.)
(* Unfortunately, only available in UK at present on BBC iPlayer.)
Thomas Edward Lawrence admits that he lost his notes and all of his manuscripts he had put together to write the 700 plus pages that make up "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom". Could his statement that he wrote the book by shear memory been a ruse in itself so he could excuse its inaccuracies let alone it excesses that defeat in any established truths?
Indeed Lawrence withdrew to the English Country side and to his almost hidden cottage at Clouds hill where there was no electricity and barely a few windows to write the Seven Pillars. His life after Arabia reflects an effort to avoid,hide from the media and the public as a whole. He stayed in the military his entire adult life after Oxford,Carchemish and Arabia. He transferred to India and than back to England continuously refusing any hire rank that the military willingly pleaded for him to take. High ranking officers where flustered to have him in their command because of his eccentric brilliance. He was a man of thousands of letters to the day he was killed near his cottage on that Braun Motorcycle.
Long, detailed, illuminating, and persuasive.
As somebody who does not speak Arabic or know enough about military history, I found this article quite compelling. I've enjoyed both the film Lawrence of Arabia - and read most of Seven Pillars. The style is both riveting and invites scepticism. It's romanticism confronts the reader on almost every page. Lawrence's intense self-absorption remains the heart of the exotic tale. And I've long wondered about the actual history of events described by Lawrence.
Thank you for writing this essay. You've given me some information to chew over - especially since President Obama has made a point of emphasizing that Lawrence of Arabia is his favorite film. What does this imply about his public policy choices and core assumptions about the Mideast?
An interesting read. I'm looking forward to the next piece. The only thing I would add is that the British have been attracted to the concept of the 'noble savage' for a long time. The Arabs for the British were pretty much what the 'redskins' were to the Americans. The 'noble savage', or desert Arab in this case, represented a counterpoint to the effete, European mentality. They were considered to be morally superior due to the fact that they had not been seduced by modernity and comfortable ways of living. Reasons for Lawrence's liking/admiration of the Bedouin can be traced to this essentially British way of thinking about the Arabs.
However, Lawrence had a personal reason to hate the Turks. He was captured in 1916 and raped by the Turkish governor of Deraa, who he described as 'an ardent pedarest'. (I'd have thought Lawrence's education at Oxford would have made the experience less arduous, though!)
But the concept of 'moral superiority' of the Arab is fast being eroded due to atrocities like 9/11 and a thousand others. And the oil-rich Islamic theocracies contradict any thought that poverty enriches the Arabic spiritual quotient: camels have been exchanged for Mercedes and Dubai is hardly a circle of tents made of animal hides.
I believe the idealisation that must be undermined today is the 'chocolate box' version of Islam touted by the liberal left. Almond-eyed lovelies strewn around on cushions in a harem are contrasted with a view through a lattice window beyond which two bearded wise-men gaze at the stars and plot their heavenly course. Of course, there's no sign of the swivel-eyed prophet on the other side of the dunes ordering the murders of anyone who doesn't measure up to his version of religious belief, while glancing in the direction of a 9 year old girl.
Jihad Watch, of course, provides the necessary information and insight for those who might be tempted to think of Islam in a lawrentian kind of way.
Bribing the enemy can work, but ONLY if it gains us a military advantage, and not to merely buy him off with appeasement. Building roads and schools is nice gesture, to wean them off the Islam, but unless those roads are useful militarily, our efforts are futile, they will blow them up. T.E. Lawrence romanticism aside, they are not like us. It's really the Islam.
The myth of Lawrence, not the sober truth (as presented by Aldington, Kedourie, Kelly, and many others), is what is given in "Lawrence of Arabia." It is -- I checked -- apparently one of, if not the, favorite movies of Barack Obama. He ought, instead of finding out about Middle Eastern history, and being fed a completely false view of the locals whom Lawrence persuaded to attack a handful of largley-inconsequential Turkish targets, with those locals being the few hundred Arabs whose leader joined the British side only when he 1) was convinced the Turks were losing and 2) the British promised, and then gave him, lots of gold.
He, Barack Obama, needs to watch fewer movies (and no basketball games) and instead to sit and read some history. He should start with "The Dhimmi" and "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" and "Islam and Dhimmitude," and then find out what Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, Joseph Schacht, Henri Lammens, Samuel Zwemer, and two or three dozen others, scholars of Islam, wrote during the period before the Great Inhibition. He should read Elie Kedourie and J. B. Kelly on the diplomatic history of the period, and get straight the story of Lawrence. He might, in passing, check what Allenby and his men testified to, which was that the most important aid extended to the British in the war against the Turks in the Middle East was that provided by the intelligence network of the Nili Group, run by Aaron Aaronson and his sister Sara (they were killed by the Turks), and not that "Arab Revolt" of Lawrence. Of course, there were reasons why -- I didn't go into it at length in my article -- the arabophiles of the Foreign Office found the Lawrentian myth so much to their liking and so useful to their aims. But that's another matter.
As for the hideous pseudo-poetic prose of Lawrence, Kelly deals with it well: the "stylized murkiness of its prose" with "a genius for self-advertisement, " Lawrence showing himself to be "as with so many of the incidents in which he was involved...the worst of witnesses, as a consequence of his habit of blurring the sharp and uncomfortable outlines of reality with swirling gusts of flaccid prose."
It is difficult to believe that General Petraeus, were he to find out the truth about Lawrence, would any longer be impressed with this giggler during the Arab massacre at the hospital in Damascus, with "they stylized murkiness," and the "petulance" of his recorded retorts that he, Lawrence, took a schoolboy's pleasure in, and in this "worst of witnesses" with his "habit of blurring the sharp and uncomfortable outlines of reality with swirling gusts of flaccid prose."
At least, I allow myself to believe -- don't you -- that he, General Petraeus, might stop recommending "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and might instead pick up something as sober, useful, and meticulous as those by Elie Kedourie, and J. B. Kelly -- why, the published lecture Kelly gave nearly thirty years ago at the Heritage Foundation, "Islam Through the Looking-Glass," or his essay in Encounter called "Of Valuable Oil and Worthless Policies," should have been committed to memory by all those going out to the Gulf, and to Muslim regions further to the East. Lawrence is truly fit now only to fire the imaginations of schoolboys, but not for sober makers, or executors, of policy.
Yes, Islam is the problem. Always has been. Always will be. Perhaps the finest example of all time of the elephant in the room that people just refuse to notice.
I would differ, though, with Hugh on one key point and it is the film, Lawrence of Arabia. Is it entirely accurate? Of course not. But there is enough in it which rings true. For instance, General Allenby, as played by Jack Hawkins, comes across pretty much as he was in real life------cynical, efficient, suspicious of Lawrence though ready to use him to advantage if possible. The depiction of Lawrence, played by Peter O'Toole, is sometimes scathing, what with Arthur Kennedy as the American journalist denouncing him or Lawrence indeed seen giggling at the hospital scene in Damascus (though not over slaughter but rather just putrid conditions). Morveover, the Arabs themselves don't come across particularly well in the film. I saw this film for about the tenth time several years ago when it came back to the big screen with an older (and highly cultured) Jewish-American who had never seen the film but had meant to for sometime. Upon exiting from the theatre I distinctly remember him saying that nothing has changed about the Arabs, that they're still as screwed up to this day as they were as depicted in the film. So, while the Seven Pillars perhaps cannot be redeemed except on literay merits (much like Arthur Schlesinger's work on the Kennedy Administration, A Thousand Days, is evidence of good writing but not good history), I would argue that David Lean's film has enough of the truth in it not be dismissed as mere fable.
But thank you, Hugh, for another fine essay on the crucial matter of our time, perhaps of all time-----what to do with, and how to treat, that monster of a religion known as Islam.
Excellent essay, and I'm anxiously awaiting the final installment.
I'd like to make a somewhat tangential comment about the exotic treatment afforded the Arabs by the West. The dreamy eyed concepts of the noble Arabs fighting evil and ruthless empires, usually revolting and disgusting caricatures of Western powers, can be seen in the desert settings and plots of other films from Hollywood besides Lawrence of Arabia. Two fairly recent (well, in the last thirty years, recent being a relative term) ones that are ostensibly of the "science fiction" genre, but which are solidly based on the noble desert Arab paradigm, are Star Wars, and Dune. The more insidious of the two in the subtle manner in which it manipulated the elements of the paradigm was Dune, by Frank Herbert. The book was interesting in its novel depiction of the desert rebels and their religion, but in the hands of Hollywood's Leftist screenwriters it was transformed into a thinly disguised antiwar and anti-Zionist screed. Perhaps not as important in the larger scheme of things as T.E. Lawrence's self aggrandizing writings, but in its own way Dune helped mold a positive public perception of the heroic Arab struggles against the West, especially in the "Palestinian" conflict.
No doubt Lawrence was a very complicated man who may have positioned himself in the right place at the right time given his background that he formed a passion for at Oxford in archaeology under the tutelage of David Hogarth and the inspirations of Gertrude Bell while at the Carchemish dig.
Much of what Lawrence tried to accomplish such as Arab Nationalism did not gain him popularity after being defined as a hero either by his own hand or the likes of Lowell Thomas and his legions of admirers. Even the media wrote scathing attacks against him over the years because of some of the positions he took .
After his futile efforts in the British Office in 1921-22, working alongside Winston Churchill, he gave his resignation . As a measure of recognition and to attempt to placate the bitterness he held toward the allies, the British Government offered Lawrence the position of Viceroy of India. He turned it down; and as a measure of his disdain he enlisted in the ranks of the Royal Air Force under the name of Ross. Continuing in the military he would once again change his name to Shaw after his friend George Bernard Shaw who in fact gave him his first Brough Motorcycle as a gift.
Some of his acquaintances where even questionable right up to the day he was killed on his motorcycle. He was even encouraged to meet with the fuhrer himself by one of his acquaintances socialist Henry Williamson just days before his fatal motorcycle accident just a few hundred yards from his cottage at Cloud Hill near Moreton. The media descended on Clouds Hill as they apparently got wind of such a meeting and threw rocks at his cottage.
Though it has been nearly 45 years that I did most of my reading about Lawrence from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Mint,The Desert and the Stars by Flora Armitage, and the Letters of TE Lawrence, I humbly admit that his writings where colorful and quite intriguing to read and for me it was the adventure of it all rather that the fiction or non fiction of what was written.
D. G. Hogarth, who oversaw Lawrence at the Ashmolean (and mentioned to in a posting just above), and who like Lawrence went out to the Middle East during World War I, had some tart things to say about the Arabs that are not at all in the Lawrentian vein. For example, the Arabs -- especially the Sharif Husain -- kept insisting that Sir Henry MacMahon had made certain promises to them that were then not kept. But MacMahon had made no such promises, and the Arabs knew it, but as today, when they sometimes deliberately misconstrue things and then insist that their misconstruing represents reality, they kept trying and trying to play on British guilt.
D. G. Hogarth was having none of it. He had been head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo during this period, and ten years after the event he wrote: "Neither to him [Sharif Husain] nor to any other Arb did we ever explicitly guarantee or even promise anything beyond liberation from the Turk. We are guiltless, therefore, of any betrayal of King Husein. The sole condition of his action -- that he be freed from his Ottoman overlords and recognized as an independent sovereign -- has been fulfilled."
These remarks were published by Hogarth in the "Journal" of Chatahm House in 1925; they were apparently overlooked by the antisemitic Arnold Toynbee, the head of Chatham House at the time, when later on he was one of those who kept prating about the British "betrayal" of the Arabs -- a theme that of course fit in very well with opposition to the founding, or existence, or continued existence, of the permanently-imperilled state of Israel.
D. G. Hogarth's memory of the events was correct and it was none other than Sir Henry MacMahon himself who, fed up with the Arab misrepresentations of what he had said and what they had thought he said, wrote a dignified and sober letter to "The Times" of London in July 1937, making clear that the Arab view, one endorsed now by arabophiles wanting to do damage to the Zionist cause, was based on falsehood. MacMahon was not someone who normally made public statements, but he was driven to do so by the constant repetition of nonsense and lies that, he finally decided, he himself would have to put paid to. And so, in the Letters columns of "The Times," he did.
End of story. Except of course, that the Arabs continue to say that they believe (they may even believe, I haven't any idea what they really believe) that they were "betrayed" by the British because of what MacMahon "promised" them and what the Sykes-Picot agreement said, or what they interpret it as having said. You can find all of this in detail in Elie Kedourie's brilliant study of the diplomatic archives, "In the Anglo-American Labyrinth." See also his "The Chatham House Version."
Not content with blurring and misshaping the story in "Seven Pillars," Lawrence proceeded to calumniate the Australians, saying that he had begged Sir Harry Chauvel, the commander of the mounted division, to keep his men outside the city that night, "because tonight would see such carnival as the town had not held for six hundred years, and its hospitality might pervert their discipline."
..................
Repulsive. It is the civilized Australians who *restored* order, shooting looters and impressing upon the "noble Arabs" that mass slaughter would not be countenanced on their watch.
As to the movie—I know it is considered a great and influential film, that won seven Oscars and was nominated for three more, as well as a slew of other prestigious awards.
In addition, I am a great fan of classic films, and a habitual watcher of Turner Classic Movies. I know I should watch this movie at some point.
But it has always seemed somewhat distasteful to me, even before I learned as much about Islam as I know now. The barbaric Arabs always seemed an odd faction to romanticize.
If there are any 'Biggles' fans here present, they may find it amusing to read, in the biography of W E Johns 'By Jove, Biggles!', by Peter Berresford Ellis and Jennifer Schofield, on pages 94-97, the account by Johns himself, author of the Biggles books, of his own personal run-in with Lawrence, when Lawrence (under a false name) presented himself as a potential recruit to the RAF (Johns then being employed as a recruiting officer).
W E Johns does not conceal the fact that when Lawrence strolled in under the name of 'John Hume Ross' he, Johns, "took an instinctive dislike to him".
Johns' account of what then transpired between Lawrence (who proffered not one but *two* false identities in the course of proceedings, both of which identities were ruthlessly exploded by Johns' meticulous cross-checking) and himself, is absolutely priceless: especially as it can be compared, detail by detail, with Lawrence's own version of the encounter.
Johns also makes it plain that when Lawrence (by pulling strings) did get into the RAF Johns and others in the flying fraternity made sure that those officers and gentlemen who would have the bad luck of having to deal with him knew who he was beforehand. He was NOT considered a prize...
Johns' account appears in two magazine articles he wrote in 'Flying' and 'Popular Flying', and in a Times article, but he also told it first-hand to Colin Simpson and Philip Knightley when they were researching 'The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia'.
Hugh,
An informative article,particularly the references to T.E. Lawrence
After reading the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and comparing it with histories of the area,I've long suspected that Lawrence was an ineffectual diletante poseur whose legend was manufactured by others. Unfortunately that "butterfly" felt the need to slander Australians, as they were witnesses to Bedouin atrocities and his own ineptitude.
Australian soldiers who had served in the ME usually had more respect for their Turkish enemies than their Arab 'allies'.
Some rare film of Lawrence with Feisel,on an RAF Boat, and at a picnic with friends.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78y7jYZ1lnE
Good find. Thanks!
I would urge you to see the film, gravenimage. As I wrote above, it's not entirely kind to the Arabs. In fact, it pretty much shows them to be the dysfunctional people that they are. Yes, some romance is attached to them, but I think it would have been expecting too much for Lean to have portrayed them in an entirely negative light. Besides, the acting is superb. Peter O'Toole's performance is stunning to behold as Lawrence, irrespective of the truth of the portrayal. Claude Rains plays a cynical old diplomat superbly. Alec Guinness gives a sentimental but yet Machiavellian touch to his performance as Prince Faisal and Jack Hawkins is absolutely spot on with his performance as General Allenby. It's also a visual and musical feast for the eyes. By all means see it at least once. In fact, I would be very much interested in your opinion of it since I value your opinion in general.
I notice that "Lawrence of Arabia" is the second film directed by David Lean to make an appearance at this site. The first was "Bridge Over The River Kwai":
Fitzgerald: Building That Bridge Over The River Kwai, Or, Why Are We In Afghanistan?
The very idea that because Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, Afghanistan has a special, irreplaceable importance in the "war against terrorism," is false.
In the first place, the fact that Al Qaeda found Afghanistan under the Taliban (a Taliban nurtured by an American-supported Pakistan, and recognized by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) useful does not mean that Al Qaeda can only regroup in Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks in London were not hatched by those trained in Afghanistan, but by people living in, raised in, Great Britain. Those who bombed the Atocha station in Madrid were not from Afghanistan. Those who killed Pim Fortuyn (a weak-minded Dutchman put up to it by Muslims) and Theo van Gogh were not trained in Afghanistan. The Chechens who seized the theatre in Moscow, or the school in Beslan, were not trained in Afghanistan. Anywhere there are Muslims, ready to participate in Jihad through violence, they will be able to find sufficient weaponry and bombs. Afghanistan is being endowed with a significance it does not possess.
In the second place, the very idea that Americans and other NATO troops must be sent in large numbers to pacify Afghanistan, a vast country, remote from Western bases, difficult to get in and out of (just look at the sums demanded by Kyrgyzstan for the continued use of an airbase), and that requires the collaboration of another meretricious Muslim state that is actually far more hideous and dangerous than Afghanistan itself, Pakistan, is nonsense. Afghanistan, or rather the various ethnic groups within it, can be controlled, or at least the threat coming from them can be managed from afar. The very idea that the only choice is ever-increasing numbers of American troops, and ever more billions poured into Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth, on the theory that Muslim hearts, if they are not with the Taliban, are therefore accessible and winnable, is absurd.
Here and there, just as in Iraq, some locals will prefer to use the Americans, and to temporarily curry favor with them out of self-interest -- that is, out of a desire for American weaponry, supplies, and money. In Afghanistan, local groups and even individual warlords, and Karzai himself, have proven adept at leading the Americans by the nose for quite a while, just as the Pakistani military has managed to do for decades, and as the Al-Saud have done in presenting themselves as not the most dangerous enemies of Infidels, but as "America's staunch ally."
The United States has squandered at least two trillion dollars in Iraq. What is the result? Possibly, a state, and an army, that consists mainly of Muslim Arabs (the Kurds are slowly being squeezed out, and Maliki's "outreach to the Sunni Arabs" will be, predictably, at the expense of the non-Arab Kurds), one that possibly will not be quite as ostentatiously aggressive as was the state run by that obviously hideous despot Saddam Hussein. But so what? How does this improve the Infidel position in the world? What has been accomplished, or could possibly be accomplished, to weaken the hold of Islam on the minds of men in Afghanistan? Nothing at all.
We, the Infidel Americans, have managed or may have managed to hold Iraq together a bit longer by doing everything we could to prevent the fissures, sectarian and ethnic, from leading to open and large-scale hostilities. And we, those American Infidels, were further kindly allowed by the local Arabs and Muslims to spend nearly two trillion dollars on this effort at a time when it is now recognized that economic warfare, and economic damage, is a key weapon in the jihadist arsenal. This remains true whether that damage is inflicted from without or self-inflicted by the assumption of responsibilities that make no geopolitical sense. And every dollar spent on Iraq, on Egypt, on Pakistan, on Afghanistan, on Jordan, on the "Palestinians," represents a transfer of wealth from Infidels to Muslims, one that goes beyond the trillions in unmerited oil revenues the Arabs and Muslims have received.
We have spent that money, and have received, and will receive, no gratitude in return. When Iraq dissolves inevitably into the warring tribes and groups, who will be blamed? America. Americans. And so much of what we spend there, by the way, is on goods (such as oil shipments from Kuwait) and services (contractors, from ditto), that enrich Kuwaitis and Qataris and Bahrainis (when our ships are in), so that we are propping up all of these statelets and peoples who are not and cannot ever be our friends, but who in the end will use and abuse us every which way. And they will do this while we spend time trying to figure out what makes them tick, when what makes them tick are the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics, of Islam.
Tarbaby Iraq is about to be followed by Tarbaby Afghanistan. The military men involved focus on the immediate task at hand. They do not have time to study, or so they think, the texts, the ideology, of Islam. They do not have time, or do not have the inclination, to think beyond the immediate theatres of war -- war understood only in the military sense, or at least in the sense of either making war or "winning hearts and minds" of combatants -- in Iraq and now Afghanistan. Do you think General Petraeus, General Odierno, General McKiernan, has stopped to consider what is happening in Western Europe? Do you think they understand that there many ways to conduct Jihad, and that deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (already showing its effects on the fear displayed by many in the political and media elites of Western Europe, determined to appease Muslims and meet their demands on so many levels), is a much greater threat to the United States and to the civilization of the West than any conceivable outcome in remote and impoverished Afghanistan, or in Iraq?
Local entanglements of course inevitably engender human sympathies -- sympathies, say, by the American officers for this or that local gunga-dinnish figure, who seems -- and in a certain sense may be -- appealing. But policy should not be based on that kind of sentimentality, and on a handful of local exceptions. We need to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad. And we need to do this without unduly squandering men, money, materiel, and morale. Propping up Afghanistan has to come to an end. Instead, officials should be soberly, coldly, even ruthlessly, deciding to manage the situation from afar, through help given to now this, and now to that, local group whose interests temporarily coincide with ours. They should be stopping all this wasteful "construction" that earns no gratitude, and merely rescues Muslims from the obvious consequences of inshallah-fatalism.
The logic of events will in the end require this realization. But how long will it take? Another few years? It ought to have been understood long ago, and would have been, if those making policy had understood, had allowed themselves to study, the meaning, and the menace, of Islam.
In the end, if Obama wishes to staunch the flow of American lives and money, he will have to pull out of Afghanistan and adopt what is suggested here. But he can protect himself from criticism on the right only by adopting, as well, the rationale offered here: pull out of Afghanistan not because Islam, and Muslims, are no threat, but precisely because they are. And resolve never to help them out of their problems, but to allow their political, economic, social, intellectual and moral failures to be on obvious display, not least to themselves. If Infidels, or a sufficient number of them, grasp the connection between the nature of Islam and the failures of Muslim states and societies, then Muslims themselves will have to begin at least to attempt to answer the argument that insists upon that connection. And in so doing, the most advanced Muslims will have to admit, to themselves if not to Infidels, that in fact Islam does explain those failures.
It explains the natural tendency toward despotism of Muslim lands, for the political theory of Islam is not one that pays attention to the will expressed by the people, but rather to the will expressed by Allah. Islam does explain, through its inshallah-fatalism, the economic paralysis, does explain the mistreatment of women and of all non-Muslims, does explain Islam as a vehicle for Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism, does explain the stunting of mental growth among those who are taught to regard themselves as merely "slaves of Allah" in a collectivist Total Belief-System, and discouraged from the kind of free and skeptical inquiry without which no progress in anything can be achieved. Infidels cannot undo all this by rescuing Iraqis, or Afghanis, from the consequences of Islam itself.
They may do so, just possibly, by removing themselves from Muslim countries, keeping Muslims from acquiring the kind of weaponry that can inflict great damage, and halting Muslim immigration to non-Muslim lands while working to reverse as much as possible the aggressive Muslim presence already achieved in those lands, through a fit of criminal negligence by our ignorant-of-Islam elites. This is the way, the only way, to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. Winning hearts and minds cannot be done, and those who think they can do so with armies, expensively maintained in the wilds of Afghanistan, are committing folly upon folly.
In their inattention to the real context, and their monomaniacal attention to the immediate task at hand -- the wrong task, undertaken for the wrong reasons -- they all remind one of Alec Guinness, as Colonel Bogey, building that bridge, urging his men to do more and more and more, and forgetting, in his mad attention to that bridge, that he is actually building it for the Japanese, helping them in their war effort. And that is exactly what some, both in the military and in the civilian part of our government, appear to be doing: overlooking the larger picture, the only picture that counts.
[Posted by Hugh on February 28, 2009]
Hugh, as always, thanks for the thought-provoking and informative essay, but I think you're being a bit too polite and cerebral. I'm a pretty vulgar bloke, so I'll return to a theme I've written about before - Arab/Islamic homosexuality/pederasty and the British upper class. If it's too rude, stop reading here. Lawrence was as bent as a hairgrip, and limp-wristy-queeny with it (O'Toole had him to a 'T'). This made him unpopular with hetero soldiers, very unpopular indeed with homo soldiers who didn't want the reasons for their Arab sympathies exposed, and exceedingly popular with the British Foreign Office, all of whom were classically educated upper-class twits who hadn't seen a woman outside the family between the ages of five and twenty-five and didn't know what they were for. They were raised on the classics, worshipped Alexander the Great and the ancient Greeks as much for their sexual orientation as for their undoubted achievements, and formed a dangerous and exclusive clique at the very heart of the British establishment.
The whole Arab prediliction for homosexuality, since women are beneath love and serve only for procreation, was so attractive to these purveyors of the British Empire that it created a permanent soft spot (if that's the phrase) in the hearts of those who dictated foreign policy to the British in those long-ago times when British foreign policy actually mattered. Natural-born British anti-Hebraism helped. And times ain't changed a lot, believe me, although the FO is less influential, thank whatever, these days.
I read Seven Pillars as a teenager, admired T.E.L.'s taste in motorcycles (a Brough Superior, a built-to-limit-gauge kind of English Harley/Indian that killed him, by the way), but was brought up by old-time journalists and soon came to loath his pretty prose. Then I travelled and worked for many years in the lands of Islam, especially Afghanistan, and found that the man was so full of it that his eyes were brown.
So that leaves us with a superficial gay, toughened on the playing fields of wherever, bribing his way to minor success with those who accept him as much for shared vice as for admiration. If that's where we learn about Arabs, then we either raise a gay army - Obama seems to be behind that - and try the same formula again, or find more appropriate heroes, role-models, and sources of inside information.
Which is a story for another day.
Amusing and informative post, a fine example of how an accurate recounting of the past has to be more than just facts and dates. History should be written the way life is lived. You just did that. Thanks.
To the Venerable Brede above, by way of explanation:
I was discussing not the promptings that might help explain T. E. Lawrence's behavior in the Middle East, but that behavior itself. This included his embrace of the Arabs and his betrayal of the British, his absurd exaggerations about the military worth of the Sharifian forces, and his attempt to take credit, for his Arabs, for what others accomplished (as the Australian Light Brigade in Damascus). His exaggeration and mythomania, are what I felt, in the time and space allotted, needed to be emphasized. And so did the awfulness of his prose, so different from the straightforward amusing vivaciousness of J. B. Kelly himself, or from the prose of Elie Kedourie, a prose so dry that it becomes, that very dryness, positively thrilling in its relentlessness, its sardonic mockery, its unassailable mastery of detail.
As for Lawrence – well, Andre Gide had similar tastes and on his visits to North Africa could indulge them with local catamites, but Gide was neither a mythomane nor a bad writer, but famously lucid ("Gide the Lucid"); Lawrence was a mythomane, and knonwn not for lucidity but for the "murkiness" of his prose. Sometimes sexual proclivities or tensions or repressions may help to explain a man's behavior, sometimes they don’t help at all -- in the case of Lawrence, I think you are justufiied in bringing certain aspects of his life to our notice, but I don't think I was wrong not to have done so.
I was more intent on bringing other matters to the attention of readers -- even to the attention, perhaps, of General Petraeus himself(who may well be quietly amused at the adjectivization of his unusual name (several centuries ago, in northern Europe, especially in the Netherlands and Sweden, it became fashionable to Latinize last names, - Linnaeus, Brezelius, et al.) to arrive, by an up-to-date relevant route, at one of the three toponyms into which, like all Gaul, all Arabia in Roman times was divided -- Arabia Deserta, Arabia Felix, and Arabia Petraea. These matters can be summed up as: how poor a guide, how posturing a poseur, was T. E. Lawrence, both as to his own role and the role of the Arabs and the Sharifian forces, and as to the relative importance of the British forces and the local Arabs for whose "exploits" Lawrence made such large claims.
I did not think I should try to deal with every aspect of the period dealt with by Lawrence. I did not, for example, include for the purposes of comparison with Lawrence's claim anything about the Nili Group, consisting of Palestinian Jews who, in Palestine, provided such important intelligence about the Turks to the British, intelligence information which, in the opinion of those British in the best position to know, were more important to the Allied war effort than that "Arab Revolt" of T. E. Lawrence). Lawrence was adept at ostentatious self-deprecation, convinced that this ploy would only help promote his steady underlying claim to having been a major actor, but posterity has not been kind to him, because posterity, it turns out, has insisted on the truth.
Let me return, once more, to the subject of sex -- good god, who can stay away from that subject for long?
I once heard a story that, even if not true, contains a truth. It’s about a trial held at the Old Bailey, many decades ago, with a defendant accused of unusual and illegal sexual behavior. After a day of testimony that contained detailed descriptions of that behavior, six of the jurors could hardly believe their ears and went home in a state of shock, while the other six went home and couldn't wait to try it themselves.
Wellington wrote:
I would urge you to see the film, gravenimage.
.........................
Thank you so much, Wellington—I do intend to see it. I often admire aspects of a movie—the acting, art direction, camera work, etc—even if I do not agree with the overall message of a film.
I realize that Lawrence of Arabia is quite readily available for rental—but for anyone who gets Turner Classic Movies, it is showing soon—on February 1 at 11pm, and again on March 20 at 8pm (both [US] eastern standard time).
Another excellent article by Hugh, as admirable for its style (learned, scathing, ironic) as its content. As is often the case on this site, the comments are on a par with the article itself. I wonder if Hugh or any of the commmentators would agree that Orde Wingate may be seen as the "anti-Lawrence" -- in his passion for the West and for the Jews, his intellectual honesty, his sympathies, his prose style (known to me only through Christopher Sykes' fine biography), even in his dress -- like Bernard Lewis, ha-yedid never went native -- he (like Blake) always kept to the traditional English folk custom of greeting friends at home in the nude, or perhaps wearing only his ridiculous pith helmet. To my mind, the other anti-Lawrence in his clear-sighted view of the local muslim natives (in particular, their violence, treachery, and lasciviousness) is that heroic veteran of the First Afghan War Henry Paget Flashman, though some have recently cast doubt on the authenticity of his memoirs.
There were a few among the British military in Mandatory Palestine who never succumbed to the "romance of the Arabs" and the desert and so on. Orde Wingate was one, he who, raised on the Old Testament, dared to teach Jews being attacked during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 the rudiments of self-defense. But before Wingate, in Mandatory Palestine's earliest days, there was Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen (though he certainly was enchanted by the bird-life of Arabia, and wrote about it). Both Meinertzhagen, who had been on Allenby's staff as an intelligence officer, protested against the actions of those in the British military -- Bertie Waters-Taylor being the most egregious -- who whipped up the Arabs to attack Jews in the Old City in 1921, and then not only prevented Jewish forces from defending themselves, but arranged for the arrest of Jabotinsky, for daring to try to defend them (Jabotsinky was tried and sentenced, but an outcry in London rescued him).
Both Meinertzhagen, and Wingate, for the sin of their taking the side of the Jews, were sent out of Mandatory Palestine. Orde Wingate went to Ethiopia, to help against Mussolini's troops, and then was in Burma, where he organized a guerrilla group, Wingate's Raiders, against the Japanese. He died, with American officers and men, in a plane crash in Burma, and is buried with them in a collective grave (it was impossible to identify, from the remains, who was who) in Arlington National Cemetery.