Never Enuf T.E. Lawrence!

Mostly, I think, we are flotsam and jetsam. Granular bits of the human biomass. History only coalesces from the random flux in retrospect. At the time that events are actually happening, there is no rhyme or reason to them. Meaning: You can certainly look at current events and identify causative factors, but those causative factors could have played out in any number of ways. That they played out the way they played out is… mere coincidence.

Rarely, though – and always in hindsight – you can see the influence of one particular human being.

This is what makes T.E. Lawrence so interesting. He really did alter the course of history. Certainly with his influence on the emerging Arab world. More certainly with his invention of guerilla warfare.

Guerilla warfare had been around since the American Revolution, at least, but Lawrence refined it in newer, more subtle ways. Every suicide bomber owes an immense debt, practical, ideological, and – dare I use this word? – spiritual to T.E. Lawrence.

I suspect this was not the effect on history Lawrence would have wished to have. As I noted yesterday, he was a classicist.