Bonaparte×Jr.

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Napoleon Bonaparte sits down with Martin Luther King Jr. for THE TRIAL. The subject — On the charge brought against them, and what the record actually shows.
2. 00:14
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   So we are here to answer for blood. As if history cares about clean hands. As if any great change ever arrived without sacrifice.
3. 00:24
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   There's a difference, General, between sacrifice and slaughter. Between the suffering men choose for themselves and the suffering imposed by force. That difference is everything.
4. 00:34
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Everything? You believe that? Then explain your own cities burning in sixty-seven, in sixty-eight. Explain Newark. Explain Detroit. Your movement, Doctor, left smoke and ruin in its wake.
5. 00:51
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   I explained it then and I'll explain it now. Those riots were not my doing. They were the eruption of despair I spent my life trying to prevent. I said in Riverside Church, a riot is the language of the unheard.
6. 01:04
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   The language of the unheard! Beautiful. But when men die in that language, when buildings burn, who carries the responsibility? You marched. They rioted. You cannot separate yourself so easily.
7. 01:22
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   I can and I must. Nonviolence was my method, my discipline, my Gospel brought into the streets. When young people turned away from it, I grieved. I didn't celebrate their anger. I tried to channel it toward justice.
8. 01:34
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Channel. A fine word. I also channeled force toward order, toward law, toward stability across Europe. And I am called tyrant. You channeled anger toward justice and they call you saint. What is the difference?
9. 01:54
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   The difference is I never commanded armies. I never ordered men to kill. I walked with sanitation workers, with sharecroppers, with children. I asked them to meet violence with soul force.
10. 02:06
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Soul force. Against police dogs. Against fire hoses. Against men with guns. Lovely in theory, Doctor, but your soul force required blood all the same. Just not your own, at first.
11. 02:25
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    It required my own from the beginning. I was stabbed in Harlem in fifty-eight, a blade an inch from my aorta. I was stoned in Chicago. Arrested twenty-nine times. And yes, I knew others would suffer. But suffering voluntarily embraced is not the same as suffering inflicted by conquest.
12. 02:43
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Conquest! There it is. As if I woke one morning and decided to conquer for sport. France was encircled by monarchies determined to crush the Revolution. I defended her. I spread the Code, the principles of eighty-nine. Liberty, equality, the end of feudalism.
13. 03:10
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And you spread them at the point of a bayonet. You reinstated slavery in the colonies, General. You sent Leclerc to Saint-Domingue to crush Toussaint Louverture. That is in the record.
14. 03:20
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Yes, it is. And I regret it. I said so myself on Saint Helena. It was an error, a stain. But do not pretend your own record is unblemished. Memphis, nineteen sixty-eight. That march you led dissolved into chaos, looting, a dead boy in the street.
15. 03:45
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Larry Payne. Sixteen years old. Shot by police, not by me, not by my movement. And when that march turned violent, I called it off. I left Memphis in anguish. I came back because I had to prove nonviolence could still work.
16. 04:02
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And then you died. Killed by the very forces you thought you could shame into decency. What did your soul force achieve against a rifle on a balcony?
17. 04:13
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    It achieved a movement that outlived me. It achieved laws that changed a nation. It achieved a moral witness that the world still remembers. What did your empire achieve, General? It collapsed before you died.
18. 04:26
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    It collapsed because all of Europe united against it, because I could not be everywhere at once. But the Code Napoleon survives. Civil law across continents is built on what I established. You speak of legacy? There is mine.
19. 04:47
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Built on how many corpses? Three million dead across your wars, by some estimates. The record shows you bled Europe dry for glory.
20. 04:55
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    The record shows I fought coalitions, not civilians. I did not bomb cities. I did not invent total war. That came later, in your century, with your democracies. Dresden. Hiroshima. Do not lecture me on death.
21. 05:15
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I opposed those bombings. I opposed the war in Vietnam with every breath I had. I said a nation that spends more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
22. 05:28
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And yet your nation did both. Spent, bombed, and passed your civil rights laws. Your moral voice did not stop the killing. It accompanied it.
23. 05:41
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. And that is my grief. I could not stop Vietnam. I could not stop the violence that consumed our cities. But I kept preaching a different way. I refused to accept that bloodshed is inevitable.
24. 05:53
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Refused to accept reality, you mean. Men are violent, Doctor. History is violent. I simply had the honesty to admit it and the skill to direct it.
25. 06:04
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And I had the faith to believe we could be better. That is not naivete. That is hope made active. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
26. 06:14
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    The arc. Yes. I have heard this. But I ask you plainly: who bends it? You marched and preached. I legislated and fought. We both bent history. We both spilled blood in the bending.
27. 06:34
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No. I accepted blood. I did not spill it. When my people were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they did not strike back. That is the difference you refuse to see.
28. 06:45
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I see it. I simply do not believe it absolves you. You set events in motion knowing violence would follow. You called it redemptive suffering. I called it war. The result is the same.
29. 07:00
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    The result is not the same. Redemptive suffering transforms. It appeals to the conscience. It makes visible the evil it confronts. Your wars conquered territory. My movement liberated souls.
30. 07:13
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Liberated souls. While cities burned. While your young radicals took up guns and called you obsolete. The Black Panthers did not quote your sermons, Doctor. They quoted Fanon.
31. 07:28
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And I mourned that. I argued with Stokely Carmichael, with the militants who said nonviolence had failed. But I never wavered. I said violence is immoral, impractical, and it leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.
32. 07:42
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Pretty words. But your government, the one you shamed into reform, used violence to enforce those reforms. Federal troops in Little Rock. Marshals in Mississippi. Your dream required bayonets too.
33. 08:03
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    To protect, not to conquer. To enforce the law of the land, not to overthrow it. That is a distinction you seem unwilling to make.
34. 08:11
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Because it is a distinction without difference. Power is power, Doctor. You wielded it through moral rhetoric. I wielded it through military genius. But we both changed the world through force, whether you dressed it in hymns or I dressed it in cannons.
35. 08:30
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No. I changed the world by asking people to suffer rather than inflict suffering. To go to jail rather than retaliate. To love rather than hate. That is not force. That is the opposite of everything you stood for.
36. 08:44
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I stood for order, for merit, for laws that did not care about bloodlines. A peasant could become a marshal in my army. A shopkeeper could sit on the bench. Is that not justice?
37. 08:58
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    It is a kind of justice. But it came wrapped in empire. And when the smoke cleared, you sat on a throne. I never sought a throne. I sought a table where all could sit as equals.
38. 09:09
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And now you sit in memory as a martyr. I sit in memory as a conqueror. But we both sit, Doctor. We both are remembered. We both paid the cost of our ambitions.
39. 09:23
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    My ambition was not for myself. It was for the least of these. For the garbage workers, for the children in Birmingham, for the sharecroppers in Mississippi. Can you say the same?
40. 09:34
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I say I lifted France from chaos. I say the peasants of Europe gained rights under my rule they never had under kings. I say I was not born to power. I earned it. And yes, I wanted glory. I admit it. Do you admit you wanted to be remembered?
41. 09:58
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I wanted the cause to be remembered. I said if I die tomorrow, let it be said that Martin Luther King tried to love somebody. Not that he conquered nations. Not that he crowned himself.
42. 10:08
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And yet here we both are, answering for the blood. The charge is the same. So tell me, Doctor, what should the verdict be?
43. 10:19
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    The verdict should be that history judges us by what we chose and what we refused. I chose nonviolence and refused the sword. You chose the sword and called it necessity. Let the people decide if that distinction matters.
44. 10:32
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then we agree on something at last. Let them decide. I will stand on my record. I suspect you will do the same.
45. 10:42
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I will. And I will trust that the record shows not just the blood, but what the blood was for. Not conquest. Not empire. But freedom. Real freedom. For everyone.
46. 10:54
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Freedom. Equality. Fraternity. I fought for those words too, Doctor. Perhaps we are not so different after all. Just dressed in different uniforms.
47. 11:09
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No, General. You wore a uniform. I wore a tie and marched without weapons. That difference is everything. And it always will be.