does ANYONE read history books? we, "the west" have been here before.

[Dammit Ann]

http://www.wesjones.com/sevenpillars%2000.xml

read it, it is beautifully written and beyond profound.



"The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.

"snip"

For my work on the Arab front I had determined to accept nothing. The Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. In our two years' partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my Government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed. It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff: but I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other words, I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber. It was an immodest presumption: it is not yet: clear if I succeeded: but it is clear that I had no shadow of leave to engage the Arabs, unknowing, in such hazard. I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose."



T.E. Lawrence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence

[illinoisprogressive]

1. I have bookcases filled with history but,

never read the 7 Pillars. It is a classic. It is usually found in the classics section. I just never was interested in the middle east. My taste runs to US and European history.
But, Lawrence was a poetic writer, wasn't he?

[Dammit Ann]

2. beautiful stuff.

he has actually brought me to tears with his sincerity.

[rwenos]

3. Yeh, And . . .

"The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies -- a cold conveninence that, by comparison, seemed selsess and even pure."

Don't get me wrong, Seven Pillars is a monumental achievement by a mighty warrior. But also "the most shameless showman since P.T. Barnum."

[Dammit Ann]

4. excuse me...

but is that really context for showmanship? he is recording his experience, as he remembers it, what exactly is offensive?

[rwenos]

5. Not Offensive . . .

Amusing. I love Seven Pillars and Lawrence's writing style. I'm just rattling your cage.

[Dammit Ann]

7. cute.

i like a rattled cage. :evilgrin:

[rwenos]

9. Moreover, Lawrence Was Not the First

Mighty Soldier to get conned about his role in the Middle East.

What about all the Americans over there now? Poor bastards. They don't deserve the lies they've been told by Chimpie, any more than Lawrence deserved the lies he was told by Allenby.

[Dammit Ann]

10. bingo.

that is why i reread it. same lies, same war, same bullshit. and now we have Iraq, literally.

[illinoisprogressive]

6. Lawrence was not a showman but, a conflicted man

He suffered with terrible bouts of depression and was forever trying to find the next windmill and when he couldn't had more bouts. He had alot of doubts about himself.

[Dammit Ann]

8. don't we all?

i just love his capacity for understanding. it is inspiring.

[sofa king]

11. My crystal-gazing mom still loves me for that book.

She thinks The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a self-help book and that I'm awakening the psychic powers of my precious bodily fluids, or something.

But I actually keep Lawrence up on the shelf near another notable work of military prose, Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, a favorite of Leo Strauss and his neoconservative bullshit artists. My favorite part of that book is known as "the Melian Dialogue." The short version is this:

The democratic government of Athens created for itself a very undemocratic empire, and was in the midst of a decades long war with the democratic empire of the very undemocratic Spartans (who were enslaving four-fifths of their population while fighting under the slogan "freedom for the Greeks").

One day, the Athenians showed up at the neutral and totally innocuous island of Melos. Envoys met with one another and the Athenians presented the Melians with a simple choice: join the Athenian empire, or die.

"For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses... since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." (5.89)

When the Melians insisted on defending themselves, the Athenians besieged them into starvation, murdered all the men, and sold the women and children into slavery. (Hey, it's better than the terms God was offering a thousand years earlier.)

Athens' justification for the crime was simply to show others that if they got out of line, the Athenians would do the same to them, and since the Melians were inoffensive and unprotected by the Spartans, they made the perfect example.

The Athenians, by the way, destroyed their empire, were defeated by the Spartans, lost their democracy, murdered Socrates, sent Aristotle into exile, didn't laugh at Aristophanes' jokes, and paved the way for their current status as wait staff to the tourists of the world.

The Melian Dialoge is more or less the model for the justification that the Bush Administration is offering for its own wars, with a lot more honesty. The neoconservatives highly admire the Athenians and their conduct of the Peloponnesian war, which lasted 28 years, and which the Athenians eventually lost, never to regain their former status among nations.

[xchrom]

12. indeed -- in the case of bush --

it's more about knowing which ideas motivate than history.

they don't care about history.

they do care about this one essential point -- which they have not done selling --
"For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses... since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." (5.89)


wolfowitz, krystal, rumsfeld, others -- haven't gone away -- even if we elect a dem president -- they will be out there whispering in the ears of corporatists who believe in their own superiority above every one else's.