Bonaparte×Orwell

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on THE TRIAL, Napoleon Bonaparte and George Orwell. They take up On the rival they secretly suspected was right all along.
2. 00:12
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Rival I suspected was right? What is this, a confessional? I don't suspect. I know. And I was right about nearly everything.
3. 00:23
   George Orwellshare moment

   That's the usual line from men who ended up on remote islands. Go on, Bonaparte. You were asked a question.
4. 00:31
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Very well. Talleyrand. The limping priest who sold me out at every turn. He whispered against the wars, said they'd bankrupt France, said I was drunk on glory. I shot him down in every council meeting.
5. 00:55
   George Orwellshare moment

   But?
6. 00:55
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   But on Saint Helena, with nothing but time and rats, I read the treaties he negotiated after my fall. The man was a snake, but he understood one thing: you cannot rule a continent with bayonets alone. I thought willpower could substitute for economy. He knew better.
7. 01:18
   George Orwellshare moment

   So you're saying he was right to betray you?
8. 01:20
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   I'm saying he was right about the limits of force. Not about betraying me. That was self-interest dressed as statecraft. But his analysis of exhaustion, of France bleeding itself white, that I dismissed too quickly. Your turn, Englishman.
9. 01:40
   George Orwellshare moment

   James Burnham. American, actually, but never mind. Former Trotskyist, turned into a sort of prophet of managerial oligarchy. We fought bitterly in print during the war.
10. 01:53
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Fought with ink. How exhausting.
11. 01:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    Burnham argued that the real struggle wasn't capitalism versus socialism, but who manages the machinery. He said power would concentrate in the hands of administrators and technicians regardless of ideology. Called it the managerial revolution.
12. 02:13
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Sensible enough. I surrounded myself with technocrats. What did you object to?
13. 02:20
    George Orwellshare moment

    I objected to his pessimism. He thought ordinary people were finished as a political force, that they'd become just cogs. I wrote that democratic socialism could still win. I believed the common man, given truth and freedom, would choose decency.
14. 02:39
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And now you think Burnham was right?
15. 02:41
    George Orwellshare moment

    I think I underestimated how quickly the managerial class would learn to manufacture consent. Look at what happened after '45. The left won the rhetoric but lost the machinery. Bureaucrats and advertisers and party functionaries took over in East and West alike.
16. 03:01
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You're describing my prefects. Every empire needs them.
17. 03:05
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's exactly Burnham's point. You can call it Empire or People's Republic or Social Democracy. The same type ends up running it: the man who knows how to work the levers. Not the workers. Not the citizens. The managers.
18. 03:22
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then what was the alternative? Chaos? I brought order to France when it was devouring itself. Someone must govern.
19. 03:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    The alternative was the thing I wanted to believe in: that you could have efficiency without oligarchy, that common decency could be organized without being crushed. Burnham said it was impossible. I spent my last years watching him be proven right in Stalin's Russia, in the British Labour government's compromises, in America's corporate liberalism.
20. 03:57
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    So you admit defeat.
21. 03:58
    George Orwellshare moment

    I admit he saw something I didn't want to see. That doesn't make his conclusion inevitable. I still think he was wrong about human nature being permanently malleable by power. But he was right that socialists like me had no serious answer to the question of who controls the controllers.
22. 04:20
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    We had an answer. The strong man at the top, responsible to history. Not committees and bureaucrats answering to no one.
23. 04:29
    George Orwellshare moment

    And how'd that work out for you?
24. 04:31
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    It worked brilliantly until all of Europe united to stop it. My mistake wasn't the system. It was thinking I could fight Britain, Russia, and Austria simultaneously. Talleyrand told me that. I called him a coward.
25. 04:50
    George Orwellshare moment

    At least you're honest about it now. Most men your size never admit their rivals had a point.
26. 04:57
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Most men my size don't end up with six years on a rock in the Atlantic to reconsider. You had what, a year or two of illness before you died? Did Burnham ever know you'd come around to his view?
27. 05:13
    George Orwellshare moment

    I didn't come around to his view. I acknowledged he'd diagnosed something real. There's a difference. He thought it was permanent and desirable, this managerial future. I thought it was permanent and monstrous.
28. 05:27
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Distinction without difference. If it's permanent, you've lost.
29. 05:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. If it's permanent and you stop fighting it, you've lost. I wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four knowing Burnham was probably right about the trajectory. I wrote it anyway because someone had to say it was evil, even if unstoppable.
30. 05:48
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Noble failure is still failure. I preferred ignoble success for as long as it lasted.
31. 05:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    And look where it got you. A name that means tyrant to half the world.
32. 05:59
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    A name everyone knows. You think anyone will remember your essays in two hundred years?
33. 06:06
    George Orwellshare moment

    They'll remember the warning. That's enough.
34. 06:08
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Is it? You just admitted your rival was right, that the thing you fought against came to pass anyway. What was the point?
35. 06:18
    George Orwellshare moment

    The point was making it harder for them. Every book, every essay that tells the truth makes the lie more expensive to maintain. Burnham was right that the managers would win. I was right that they'd have to work for it, that they couldn't make it pretty.
36. 06:37
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Philosophy. I dealt in facts. Territory gained, laws written, enemies defeated.
37. 06:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    And lost, and repealed, and victorious. You're angrier about Talleyrand than I am about Burnham. At least I can admit he saw clearly.
38. 06:54
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I admitted he was right about exhaustion. I didn't say I forgave him.
39. 06:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    Neither did I. Burnham became a Cold War propagandist, backed every American intervention, thought nuclear brinksmanship was splendid. He was right about the diagnosis and criminally wrong about the cure.
40. 07:15
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    So we both had rivals who saw the trap we were walking into.
41. 07:19
    George Orwellshare moment

    And we both walked into it anyway because the alternative was not trying.
42. 07:24
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Speak for yourself. I walked in because I thought I could win. You walked in knowing you'd lose.
43. 07:33
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's the difference between a conqueror and a writer. You need to believe in victory. I only needed to believe in the attempt.
44. 07:41
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then you were a fool.
45. 07:43
    George Orwellshare moment

    Probably. But I'm a fool who didn't invade Russia in winter.
46. 07:47
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I invaded in June. The winter came later. Everyone gets that wrong.
47. 07:53
    George Orwellshare moment

    The winter always comes later. That's what Talleyrand was trying to tell you.
48. 07:58
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Yes. And what was Burnham trying to tell you?
49. 08:02
    George Orwellshare moment

    That power doesn't care what you call it. That the future belongs to whoever controls the police and the filing cabinets. That ideology is decoration on the inevitable.
50. 08:14
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Sounds correct to me.
51. 08:15
    George Orwellshare moment

    It probably would. You were the filing cabinet in a hat. But here's what he missed: even if the managerial oligarchy is inevitable, whether it's transparent or opaque, brutal or merely stifling, those distinctions matter. They matter to the people living under it.
52. 08:34
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    The people. Always the people with you types. The people wanted glory when I gave it to them. They wanted bread when I couldn't. Fickle as cats.
53. 08:48
    George Orwellshare moment

    And yet you spent your exile justifying yourself to them in your memoirs. Curious, for a man who claims not to care.
54. 08:58
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I was setting the record straight.
55. 09:00
    George Orwellshare moment

    You were hoping they'd remember you differently than Talleyrand said they would. He predicted you'd be a cautionary tale. You wanted to be a hero.
56. 09:09
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I am both. That's the privilege of scale.
57. 09:11
    George Orwellshare moment

    Fair enough. So here we are: two men who fought rivals they couldn't quite shake, who suspected in the dark that maybe the bastards had a point.
58. 09:22
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I don't lose sleep over it.
59. 09:24
    George Orwellshare moment

    You lost six years over it on Saint Helena.
60. 09:26
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Forced vacation. Not regret.
61. 09:29
    George Orwellshare moment

    Call it what you like. The result's the same. They were right about something, and we know it, and knowing doesn't change anything.
62. 09:37
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then why are we talking about it?
63. 09:39
    George Orwellshare moment

    Because someone asked. And because it's the one thing men like us never say in public. That somewhere in the fight, we heard the other side and flinched.
64. 09:51
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I never flinched.
65. 09:53
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're flinching right now.