Important
Assassination Movie Quashed
Sometimes, not all
“accidents” are accidental.
(statement on the
screen before the opening credits)
Released for public viewing in October of
2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already
garnered 28 awards and seven additional
nominations. A 1962 movie with a similar
title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best
known and popular of all time. This one,
Lawrence: After
Arabia,
deals
not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very
suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a
rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner. Lawrence was just 46 years old.
Just as Oliver Stone’s JFK presents
a compelling alternative narrative to the official lone-nut-assassin
explanation of President John F. Kennedy’s death, Mark J.T. Griffin’s Lawrence:
After Arabia gives us a dramatic alternative scenario for how a very
important person in 20th century British—indeed, in world and
especially Middle Eastern—history met his premature end. And just as there is a mountain of evidence
behind what Stone presents in JFK, screen writer and director Griffin
has drawn upon a great deal more than his imagination in crafting Lawrence: After
Arabia.
At that point, the comparison with those
two earlier movies ends. As compelling
and important and critically acclaimed as Griffin’s new movie is, as far
as the general public is concerned, it might as well have not been made. It has been kept from view like a purged
former Soviet politburo member airbrushed out of an old photograph of the Red
Square May Day reviewing stand. I was
aware of the fact when the movie was released and kept waiting for it to show
up in our area in metropolitan Washington, D.C., but without any luck. Even the quite extensive Wikipedia page on T.E. Lawrence which
lists films concerning the man under its “In popular culture” section makes no
mention of it.
What, we might wonder, is going on? Some hint is found in this interview of Griffin in which
the interviewer tells us that, “[Lawrence’s] uncompromising and direct manner
and beliefs created many powerful and influential enemies.”
Mark J.T. Griffin: I
originally wrote a radio play, which morphed into a screenplay. Around
2017 I sent the screenplay to about 60 production companies to see if there was
any interest in filming the project and while I had encouraging feedback no one
wanted to take it on. I think in 2017 I decided that if no one else
wanted to film it then I would!
So,
in a certain sense, the film is the movie equivalent of a self-published book,
and one can tell from watching it that it is very much a low-budget affair,
hardly measuring up David Lean’s epic in production quality and expense. But that was out of necessity because all of
those production companies rejected it.
Might their rejection of the movie have been because, in their
collective wisdom, Griffin really had merely blown a few rumors and suspicions
out of proportion, out of which he was just looking to make some money and earn
a name for himself?
We
can get a partial answer to that question by turning to “The Murder of Lawrence of Arabia” by Tony Hays, published online in criminalelement.com on
August 15, 2013. The article provides,
in this writer’s opinion, enough circumstantial evidence to make one doubt the
official conclusion, and, furthermore, Hays offers this as a possible
assassination motive:
Around the time of his
death, Lawrence was aligning himself with Sir Oswald Moseley [sic, it’s Mosley], leader of the British Union of Fascists. And when
he sustained the injuries that led to his death, Lawrence had been on his way
to see his good friend, Hawthornden Prize winner Henry
Williamson, who was facilitating a meeting between Lawrence and Adolph
Hitler. Lawrence, like other veterans of World War I, abhorred the idea
of yet another war in Europe, and, like Moseley and Williamson, saw dialogue
with Hitler as a necessary first step to preventing it.
In 1935, Lawrence was still a national
hero. Moseley advocated peace, but there was an active war lobby in England. It
is thought that Lawrence was about to publicly embrace the peace movement. This
would have been very embarrassing to the war lobby.
Hays
is not a man to be believed implicitly, as one can gather from my article, “The
Other British Forrestal.” The Mosley and the Williamson contacts come up in the movie, but so, too, does the much
more compelling motive for Lawrence’s likely assassination and the much more
likely reason what all those movie companies cold-shouldered Griffin’s project. Also, in the movie, but completely missing
from the Hays article, is the very best physical evidence that the official
accident story is so much hokum. To its
credit, criminalelement.com permits a full free-for-all in its “comments”
section, and one can piece together the real story by reading all of them
carefully.
At
this point, you might not want to do that, avoiding the “spoilers,” because
Griffin brings out the likely motives and the best evidence for assassination
quite well in the movie, and Lawrence: After Arabia is available on Amazon
for viewing on your computer at quite reasonable prices, either to rent or to
own. I would suggest that you either
rent or buy it sooner rather than later and watch it as soon as possible
because, as I read the purchase terms, you could still be denied access to it
at some future date for reasons that seem rather opaque to me. If enough people begin to watch it and to
figure out its significance, it’s easy enough to imagine that those
cancellation terms could come into play.
Zionists? What
Zionists?
You
really don’t need to know a great deal of history to know who had the greatest
motive to assassinate Lawrence of Arabia.
The basis for his fame was his successful mobilization of the Arab
subjects of the German-allied Ottoman Empire in the Middle East to rise up in
revolt, upon the British promise that should they win the war the Arabs would
be granted independence and would be able to determine their own fate in the
future.
As
we can see from my article, “The Balfour Declaration’s Bitter Fruit,” the promise that lay behind Lawrence’s mobilization of
the Arabs was even formalized in an agreement between the British High
Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon and King Hussein, the Shereef of Mecca, early in 1916. But in November of 1917, with the Balfour
Declaration, the British promised in so many words that Palestine would in due
time be for the Zionist Jews to rule should Britain be victorious in the war,
even though at that time Jews represented less than 10 percent of the
population of Palestine. What do you
think “Lawrence of Arabia,” of all people, would think about that, and how far
might he have been willing to go to see that his Arab friends who had staked
everything on the basis of the British promise to them to see to it that they
were not completely betrayed?
“The
Balfour Declaration has been widely criticized by historians and government
officials alike for its role in dividing established communities and
backpedaling on British promises to Arabs — an issue Col. Lawrence did his best
not to let Parliament forget after the war was over,” wrote Lauren Coontz in Coffee
or Die magazine
just last year.
This
short little excerpt from Lawrence’s Wikipedia
page gives an idea of the man’s
influence:
Lawrence
was a prolific writer throughout his life, a large portion of which was epistolary; he often sent several letters a day, and several
collections of his letters have been published. He corresponded with many
notable figures, including George Bernard Shaw, Edward
Elgar, Winston
Churchill, Robert
Graves, Noël
Coward, E.
M. Forster, Siegfried
Sassoon, John Buchan, Augustus
John, and Henry
Williamson. He met Joseph
Conrad and commented perceptively on
his works.
He
also attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 at the end of the war. The Wikipedia page even has a photograph of
Lawrence posing with the Arab delegation to the conference. Consonant with the promises of the Balfour
Declaration, that conference granted the British a mandate for “temporary
governance” of Palestine, but there’s nothing about that on Lawrence’s
Wikipedia page. Neither the words
“Balfour Declaration” or “Zionist” appear anywhere. *
You
will notice that Yates in his article on Lawrence’s likely murder breathes not
a word about Zionists or Zionism, which means, of course the Balfour Declaration
and the betrayal of the Arabs that it represented is a long way out of the
picture. Griffin doesn’t exactly hit
viewers over the head with the Zionism angle, but the Zionists are there
lurking in the shadows as the likely string pullers of British government
covert operatives, who are the more obvious villains of his story.
The
most telling avoidance of the Zionism question in relation to T.E. Lawrence is
to be found in National Public Radio’s 43-minute interview in 2013 of author Scott Anderson concerning his book, recently
published at that time, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and
the Making of the Modern Middle East. One
can hardly think of any greater deceit than the British getting the Arabs to
lay their lives on the line fighting against their Ottoman Turk overlords with
the solemn promise that the British would grant them their independence should
they win the war, only to see the British turn around and promise what amounted
to eventual sovereignty over Palestine to Jewish immigrants who were mainly
natives of various European countries.
Yet, there’s not a word about the Balfour Declaration in the interview
nor is there even any mention of Zionists or Zionism.
Avoiding
the topic keeps people away from suspecting that the people behind Lawrence’s
death are those with a very extensive assassination record in furtherance of
their political objectives such as the killing of Lord Moyne,
Count Bernadotte,
and likely of Gerald Bull,
and of Palestinian leaders too numerous to mention. For clandestine assassinations the staged accident
is almost as popular as the staged suicide, which was clearly the fate of the
leading U.S. opponent of Zionism, Defense Secretary James
Forrestal.
It’s really very easy to get by
with when you have the government and the news media in
your pocket.
The effective suppression of Lawrence: After Arabia shows that
it’s also very helpful to have control over the entertainment industry, as
well.
*
“Zionism” does appear once, in a list of references at the bottom: “Storrs,
Ronald (1940). Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine.” The book is available online, and its
title is extremely misleading. Sir Ronald Henry Amherst Storrs was an early
military governor of Palestine and one of the six pallbearers at Lawrence’s
funeral. The book is just a pasting
together of two essays, the first and shorter one is a tribute to his friend,
T.E. Lawrence; the second is about Zionism and Palestine. It is the work of the government functionary
and, hence, of the necessary politician that Storrs was. We learn nothing from it concerning
Lawrence’s attitude toward Zionism. In
the beginning, we do get from Storrs the official boilerplate on the
man’s death: “On May 6, 1935, swerving his motor cycle
to avoid two boys riding abreast, he was violently thrown and met his death.”
David
Martin
March
4, 2022
Home Page Column Column 5 Archive Contact