“We must love one another or die”

-W.H Auden

 

“All wars are unnecessary. Human unity has only ever been accomplished through peace.”

Marcus listened, trying his best not to grind his teeth into a fine paste.

“My opponent today is under the impression that all of us in this room are too privileged, too uptight, and too ‘triggered’ to understand that this is a lie peddled to us by – who, I wonder? Communists? Neo-Marxists? Or maybe the age-old enemy of the young white male – Feminists!”

A series of chuckles came from the student body. Marcus was about ready to split his pen in half. He’d promised himself he’d take notes – that he’d focus on fact-based debate.

“Don’t let yourself get baited!” Maria had told him when he groggily rose from bed at 2 am this morning to look over his speech for the seventeenth time. “If Steven starts off with ad-hominem attacks, don’t rise to it. You hear me? You can be such a bloody hothead and that’s not the look you want.”

Now here he sat in the lecture hall, his hands practically shaking with rage, which of course the student photographers at the debate event would take a snapshot of and label as fear in tomorrow’s campus paper.

Above the door to the lecture theatre hung an ‘Exit’ sign in blazing neon letters that proved to be distractingly tantalizing. And below this sign, hanging limply from the door, was plastered the name of the event he’d, in his infinite wisdom, decided it would be a good idea to speak at:

‘The Morality of Warfare’

Recent tensions in the Far East had prompted heated discussion on the subject on campus, and the Head of the Centre for Military History had called on him to make a case that their faculty was still a legitimate one. Marcus had risen to the challenge like a rooster with the rising sun, and only afterwards had he realized exactly who his opponent would be.

“Of course, I don’t mean to assert that my opponent today is nothing but a mouthpiece of ideologically charged talking points, but his track record speaks for itself.”

Steven fucking Barenz. Straight A student of Philosophy, English Literature, and chairman of the Equality Office – as dystopian as that title sounded. He was a self-proclaimed crusader for justice, who had taken it upon himself to see that Marcus’ faculty – indeed his entire subject itself – was deemed too dangerous to be taught to the bright young minds of this generation.

Looking around him at those ‘bright young minds’ who were currently eating up Steven’s words – the same ones that had held up signs like ‘WAR IS MURDER’ outside - Marcus realized that he’d already risen to the bait. This whole damn ‘debate’ was a sham. He’d expected as much when campus security had had to escort him to his seat.

“Yes,” Steven went on, hands flying around like an evangelical preacher. “Marcus Graham has been a spokesperson for Fascists, Nazis, and Conservative political pundits who want nothing more than to see a progressive academic institution like ours burned to the ground. Just yesterday he was seen endorsing the campaign of noted Fascist Youtuber ThreeStar, who is currently looking for signatures to ensure that women have no rights to their own bodily autonomy!”

An image of Marcus posing for a selfie with a blonde-haired woman then filled the lecture hall screen, and a series of gasps trickled through the crowd.

Marcus failed to see what posing for a photograph with someone who asked him for one had to do with collusion or endorsing this woman’s anti-abortion campaign. Furthermore, he failed to see what it had to do with the subject at hand. But that might be his naivety talking. The subject wasn’t really what was being discussed here at all, was it?

Steven droned on with four other examples of Marcus being someone who hated most human beings on this earth who weren’t white men. He barely listened, picking up the usual list: transphobia, bigotry, racism, non-Christians – never mind that Marcus had always maintained a staunch position of Agnostic Atheism throughout his life. He wasn’t there to judge history or the people who participated in it. He was there to observe patterns, and to learn.

And learning, Marcus scoffed to himself, had itself become something of a battle in recent years.

Suddenly Steven came to the crux of a real argument, and Marcus entered the room once more:

“War has accomplished nothing but suffering,” he was saying, hands gripping the podium like it might fall away from him. “And it brings out the worst in human nature. Witness the Rape of Nanjing by the Imperial Japanese Kwomangting, the atrocities committed in the name of God during the Crusades, and the complete failure that was Vietnam. These incidents speak for themselves. They were invasions, pure and simple, of a foreign power against a sovereign nation. The idea of ‘Might makes Right’ was fully on display – and legitimized all atrocities the invading forces committed. The children of Nanjing, Ho Chi Ming, and Akris were slaughtered like cattle, all for the sake of some ideological victory over a perceived ‘enemy’.

Furthermore, the concept of ‘good wars’ and ‘bad wars’ that Marcus has written so much about has no basis in reality. Even in the Second World War, the allied forces cannot claim the moral high ground in the wake of the firebombing of Dresden, an event which killed approximately 25000 innocent German lives. I wonder what the Founding Fathers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would say if they heard Mr Graham speak today on the ‘necessity’ of the atomic bomb that vaporized their people? Could he look them in the eye – the melting bodies of the Japanese who died in nuclear fire – and tell them they were just the necessary casualties needed to end the war?”

The crowd had grown silent. Almost reverent, and a chorus of rapturous applause echoed from every seat as Steven bowed lightly and finished up his opening statement.

Marcus, meanwhile, was just surprised that Steven had actually read something he’d written, even if he’d done nothing more than give it a cursory glance.

The Speaker then invited Marcus to the podium. He rose steadily, his notes crumpled in his hand.

“Just breathe”, he muttered under his breath. “Face your fear, and do it anyway.”

Some boos and jeers greeted him instantly, and Steven’s proud, smug face beamed at him from the front of the crowd.

As the spotlight above hit his eyes, Marcus was suddenly transported back to Maria fixing his tie before he stepped out of his apartment this morning.

“He’ll try everything to distract you,” she had said. “The crowd will be on his side. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” he’d told her with a smile. “But I have to do this.”

“Why? It’s not like you have anything to prove. You’re gonna be a published author soon. You don’t have to answer a callout from some brash liberal trying to rile you up.”

“Don’t use labels like that,” he said with a chuckle. “They do nothing but keep us all divided.”

“It’s what he’d call himself,” she shrugged.

He looked at her pale face framed by locks of amber hair and inset with gleaming chestnut eyes. When he’d started seeing her, most people remarked how she looked more like a ghost than a woman.

How ironic, then, that she was the only woman he’d ever met who saw him for who he was – who had been able to see that within this bookish military history nerd there beat a heart filled to the brim with passion for everything he threw himself into.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said again as she pressed a wet kiss onto his pallid lips.

“I know,” he whispered. “But in order to be able to think, we all need opposition every now and then. I don’t want to live in a world where we all believe the same things.”

“The way things are going…” she replied tentatively. “With people like him around…”

He took her hands in his and smiled through his tiredness. “Maria, that’s exactly why we have to fight!”

It was her face that he saw through the bright spotlights of the lecture hall, and then, as the light dimmed and dipped beneath his eyes, he looked out onto a sea of hatred.

He muttered an apology to Maria. He wasn’t about to take this sitting down.

“My opponent seems to know everything about me,” he began, looking directly into the sea of anger as it slowly began to swell with his every word. “But I believe it is more useful to judge a man by the content of his speech rather than by the company he keeps.”

The seething had already begun. He didn’t care.

“Mr Barenz would have me answer for the sins of a generation that came before me. He would parade me before you like a witch on trial. And yet, I wonder if he has truly spared a thought to the piles of corpses he wants to stand on. Would Mr Barenz care to listen to the 6 million Jews massacred in the Holocaust, and tell them that Dresden was the worst calamity of that barbarous conflict? Would he care to listen to the thousands of Americans butchered in Japanese internment camps, or perhaps the six million Chinese civilians who, as he puts it himself, fell to the Japanese Imperial Army from as early as 1936 and who, for the record, make up the highest percentage of civilian casualties experienced across the entire wartime period? Could he look at that sea of dead and tell them the atomic bomb was a mistake?”

The crowd was starting to rise up in arms. He went on, unperturbed.

“I am not here to shock you,” Marcus said, trying to check his flaring temper. “I am here to point out that if Mr Barenz’ argument is that atrocity exists, then I agree with him. It happens to be a part of human nature and –“

“WHO ARE YOU TO DECIDE THAT!?”

The question was belted by a young man in the crowd that Marcus could barely even see.

“I don’t decide a thing. None of us do. Human history follows identifiable trajectories,” he explained. “War has been part of every developed culture on the face of this earth. To look at only atrocities committed in warfare and judge all armed disputes based on them is to deny the necessity of fighting a just conflict.”

“JUST?!” someone yelled back at him. “Your justice is Fascism – nothing more!”

By this point, Marcus’ teeth were practically sharpened. He despised nothing more than the moronic labeling of challenging ideas as ‘Fascism’.

“What is ‘just’ has no ideological bearing,” Marcus replied, his grip tightening on the podium’s edges. “Would you tell Cochise that, even though the odds were against him, he should have simply given up and submitted to the USA’s genocidal campaigns against his people? Evil is evil – plain and simple.”

“Who is this kid?” one of the professors suddenly barked up at him – one holding a sign that read ‘BAN THE BOMB’. Whatever bomb it was referring to, Marcus didn’t know.

“But I –“ Marcus stammered, seeing fists begin to flare and tempers rise. “I – I am not here to defend the concept of warfare! I am here to defend the study and analysis of military conflict as a legitimate branch of history.”

“And you’re doing a shitty-ass job of it!”

“History is-often-written by the victors!” Marcus shouted, fumbling with his notes, trying to be heard over the increasing might of the crowd. “But this is only partially correct – in truth, it is written by historians. Historians who have the objectivity to look at the past and learn from the mistakes we, as humans, have made. And I tell you that war is not a blanket evil. We must catalog and emphasize the horrors of war. But we must also catalog the simple fact that, sometimes, one person – or one people – must stand up and fight.”

“You Jingoist bastard!” another voice cried.

“No!” Marcus shouted right back, his voice becoming increasingly hoarse. “I do not condone conquest, or the enslavement and domination of others through military force. Force cannot change the minds of a people. But education can-“

He stopped, feeling something heavy and sharp impact the side of his head, and his hand flew to feel the trickle of blood that had started to run down the side of his face.

The object that had been thrown at him – a rock wrapped in notebook paper – fell heavily to the ground.

And with it, all hell broke loose in the hall.

Some students had started charging the stage, barreling over their classmates while they flew a peace sign from a great banner that trailed after them. The campus guards surged forward, bearing down on the protestors while the doors were opened from the outside and the call went out that the lecture was finished. As the students started to be funneled away by the overburdened security guards, some started crying out bloody murder, while others tried to maze the campus guards before they were shoved away, taking selfies of their brutalized faces and telling their online followers that they had just been assaulted at Mr Graham’s lecture. No mention of Steven Berenz was made.

Marcus watched in stunned horror as the remaining students fighting in the hall clambered over themselves, trying to reach him, while the beleaguered Campus guards did what they could to extract him as soon as possible.

“Come on, son,” one of them told Marcus, grabbing him by his limp arm and dragging him away by force. “Time to go.”

Marcus looked through the haze of red that clouded his vision at the baying, hateful crowd. Like a pack of jackals yipping to see him shredded apart. They hadn’t come here to listen or to learn.

And as he let the security detail lead him outside, he suddenly realized his mistake: he had taken the bait long before the lecture had even started.

***

The incessant ticking of Marcus’ antique clock dominated his meager student apartment.

Above, his ceiling fan spun with little alternative as he lay on his threadbare couch like a potato stewing in the warm California sun. Maria looked down at him, her lithe fingers stroking his thinning, disheveled hair.

“You know,” she said. “Maybe if you’d at least showered before the show, they’d have listened to you.”

He struggled to form a wry smile, taking her hand in his.

“I’m a fool, Mari.”

She shook her pale face. “No you’re not,” she said. “You’re just someone who actually believes in the things he says. That’s never gonna make you a popular guy on a college campus.”

He sighed, long and deep, as he reached for his phone.

Maria, however, was faster. She snatched it up and threw it away.

“Nope,” she told his incredulous face. “You’re not looking at that. You’re gonna look at me instead.”

She took his face in both her hands and squeezed his cheeks together, rubbing them like he was a little boy being reprimanded for bad behavior.

“Hey!” he chuckled. “I’m a sensitive man, you know.”

She planted a kiss on his forehead. “Don’t I know it. That’s why I’m not having you look at your feed. You’ve lost all your ‘X’ and Insta privileges today.”

He sighed again as his eyes traced her defined features, losing himself momentarily in the chestnut sea of her eyes. He’d made the mistake of checking his socials in the wake of the debate, seeing – well – exactly what he expected. Students had taken to saying he incited violence, and all they needed to prove this claim was some pictures of bruised faces and copies of his student transcript which, of course, someone had managed to procure. Now they were organizing a petition to have him removed from his faculty, labelling him a Stochastic Terrorist. Nevermind that he-

“Hey,” Maria interrupted his thoughts. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking about those Twitter freaks again. What have I told you about letting them get to your head?”

He closed his eyes. He knew she was right. As a student of Communications and Psychology, she knew much more about how the modern world of propaganda and how it worked than he ever had. He’d been too stuck in the past before he met her. She’d led him into the present.

“Mari,” he said. “What am I going to do?”

She blinked. “About what?”

“They’ll never publish the book now.”

He looked towards the manuscript on his desk – screeds and screeds of painstaking research compiled over at least 6 years of constant study as part of his Doctoral Thesis. An overview of military tactics from the medieval-early-modern-contemporary era, and an assessment of observed patterns. Effectiveness of campaigns, relative strengths of military commanders, technological developments and how these strategies from the past could still have practical application.

It was his life’s work, staring him in the face every morning, begging him to finalize it and send it out into the world.

But now? Now he could barely even look at it. It was as though he – the author – had failed the work. He wasn’t worthy enough to carry it through.

“You always doubt yourself,” Maria said gently, her fingers playing with his tufts of frizzled hair. “But – look – it’s you that’s the most important thing here. You haven’t taken a break in days. Look at you.”

She sat up and forced him to look in a small glass mirror. The reflection that looked back at him barely resembled what he knew to be himself – his dark rimmed glasses were steamed up and cracked at the ends, the sharp jade eyes behind them looked at him with judgement, and his beard was just as matted and unkept as his hair.

“To tell you the truth,” she said. “I’m worried about you, Marc. You’re not looking after yourself. You’re throwing everything away on this. Life’s more than just study, you know. It’s more than just recognition. Who the hell cares if they don’t like the book? You don’t have anything to prove to them.”

He shifted his eyes and looked back at the manuscript, seeing – as only an author could – all the blood, sweat, and tears he’d poured into it over the years.

“I am that book,” he said.

When then he curled up to sleep, he felt Maria’s hand touch his back like she was trying to dress an open wound before he escaped into the world of his dreams.