Greatest Briton nominations

Threedee said:
The world would be a thousand times better off if Lawrence hadn't helped topple the Ottoman Empire. We would be dealing with a far more stable ME (or at least pacified), run by the Turks, who have long aspired to be a part of the West (such as trying to join the EU, etc.).

Also, Lawrence sold the Arabs on a bill of goods that he knew the British would never go along with. In the end, the Arabs, and the ME as a whole, got screwed over at Versailles. Its largely why they tended to support Hitler during WWII.
Click to expand...
Jesus Fuck man! Where do you come up with this shit? Fucking Lawrence pulled Arab culture out of the freaken stone ages and into the modern world, kicking and screaming, by their boot straps. You really ought to go study the man before you go popping off on your revisionist shit. The reason T.E. Lawrence was a great man is that he was one of these geniuses that the British seem to produce on a regular basis, who was a well rounded man of all seasons. Lawrence was not just a soldier. He was also a scientist, a scholar, a writer, a poet, a diplomat and he performed all brilliantly.

What he wasn't so good at was riding motorcycles.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Jesus Fuck man! Where do you come up with this shit? Fucking Lawrence pulled Arab culture out of the freaken stone ages and into the modern world, kicking and screaming, by their boot straps. You really ought to go study the man before you go popping off on your revisionist shit. The reason T.E. Lawrence was a great man is that he was one of these geniuses that the British seem to produce on a regular basis, who was a well rounded man of all seasons. Lawrence was not just a soldier. He was also a scientist, a scholar, a writer, a poet, a diplomat and he performed all brilliantly.

What he wasn't so good at was riding motorcycles.
Click to expand...

Arab culture is out of the stone age? Okay, saying for a moment that it is, I don't care. I want it ordered and pacified, and the Turks were once in the position to do that!!
 
Threedee said:
Arab culture is out of the stone age? Okay, saying for a moment that it is, I don't care. I want it ordered and pacified, and the Turks were once in the position to do that!!
Click to expand...
I don't agree with that either but for the sake of argument even if you were right abut that, what the hell does it have to do with T. E. Lawrence being a Great British man?
 
Threedee said:
Col. Lawrence led the Arabs in throwing off Turkish rule.
Click to expand...
and since the Ottoman empire was an exhausted, dead and decaying Empire was their any way they could have prevented that?

Look, you're missing the point all together. T.E. Lawrence was much more then just a soldier. As accomplished as he was as a soldier, and whether you recognize the significance of his accomplishments as a soldier or not, he was just as accomplished as a scientist, a scholar, a writer and a poet. That is why he was great.
 
I think the world would be a better place now if the Progressives would've gotten power in 1912, the US had stayed out of WWI, the Allies had just given up trying to eke unconditional surrender out of Germany and gone home, and the Ottoman empire still staid in existence.
 
Threedee said:
The world would be a thousand times better off if Lawrence hadn't helped topple the Ottoman Empire. We would be dealing with a far more stable ME (or at least pacified), run by the Turks, who have long aspired to be a part of the West (such as trying to join the EU, etc.).

Also, Lawrence sold the Arabs on a bill of goods that he knew the British would never go along with. In the end, the Arabs, and the ME as a whole, got screwed over at Versailles. Its largely why they tended to support Hitler during WWII.
Click to expand...

Not quite true. Lawrence was sold the job on the basis of the British government's promises of an independent Arab nation. He was betrayed as much as the Arabs, as demonstrated by his actions after the betrayal, trying to find anonymity.

If Lawrence hadn't been betrayed, we would have had a far stabler ME.

But what an achievement, to unite the disparate Arab tribes and lead them in a singlehanded destruction of the Ottoman empire.

I think, even with the betrayal, I would have loved to have such a legacy!
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Could be, I don't really know the detail behind his death other then that he died in a motorcycle accident.
Click to expand...

I used to live in Poole, Dorset and the place where he died, a village called Wool, is about 15 miles away. There is a plaque beside the road marking the spot where his motorbike veered off and hit a tree.
 
tom prendergast said:
Not exactly true, Malaysia is fairly close to being a secular democracy as is Indonesia.
It is a little known fact that Malaysia could easily have been either a Communist dictatorship or a Muslim fundamentalist nation without the British stopping the insurgency in its tracks in the 1950s.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a912750182&fulltext=713240928
Click to expand...

Well, the Turkish government is actually anticlerical. And in this role, they sometimes aren't democratic. Secularism is definitely protected much better than in any other muslim nation.

Indonesia practices a relatively moderate kind of Islam, but all the main parties recognize "submission to the one god" as a guiding principle, and some of the provinces have descended into fundamentalism. One has brought back stoning and has morality police patrolling the street and telling girls they're sluts if they wear blue jeans.
 
tom prendergast said:
I used to live in Poole, Dorset and the place where he died, a village called Wool, is about 15 miles away. There is a plaque beside the road marking the spot where his motorbike veered off and hit a tree.
Click to expand...

It has been bantered about that he never fully recovered from the alleged abuse, at the hands of the Turks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top