DEBUT NOVEL AND OUTLOOK ON HISTORY IN RETROSPECT

On this day, two and a half centuries ago, the American Republic was born, preaching ideals of freedom and equality. On this day, six years ago, I published the Alternative History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a novel with a title that surely rolls off the tongue, also preaching ideals that could be summed up as follows: Learn your history or be condemned to repeat it, and WWHIRENF? (What Would Happen If the Roman Empire Never Fell?) On this day, last year, on a trip to Mackinac Island, my wife and I attended a live reading of the full Declaration of Independence. Our growing disillusionment was stirred by the words of the founders that resonate still today and by how we have inevitably allowed history to repeat itself.

The question of WWHIRENF has fascinated me since my high school career. I had brought it up multiple times circa 2009 C.E., when my good friend at the time finally retorted, “There is no ‘What if.’ The fall was inevitable.” As much as I had to concede he was right, and even as much as I knew that eliminating one preventable disaster would not eliminate another worse disaster, I could not help but regard in frustration the 1000 years of Dark Ages that followed and the immeasurable knowledge lost in the final burning of the Library of Alexandria by Arab invaders. I would confidently proclaim, we would probably have progressed by about 2000 years, and I would imagine what that looked like. 

As a young history enthusiast, I had a threefold analysis of history: World history, which was both full of glories and plagued with tragedies, such as Nazi Germany and, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. My ancestral Egyptian history, which follows a sinosoidal wave of ups and downs depending on which king or what empire was in charge. American history, which only progressed along the upward trajectory. I believed the narrative that the American government and the American people have grown over time towards more equality and more rights, and they have always fought the right causes domestically and globally. I had struggled to understand how regression was even possible, or how people even let such shameful events stain their history. "This would never happen in America," I would think when studying any declines or setbacks in the history of the world. That mentality remained undisturbed until 2016, after the enshrinement of marriage equality, the rise of a converging consensus on necessary action on gun violence and climate change, during the first black president's term as we were about to elect the first woman president. Instead, we elected an unserious, vindictive, and unqualified man, who weaponized racist and sexist rhetoric. That election upended twelve score years of progress and political, institutional, and legal norms. That election inspired the entire premise of the Alternative History, intertwining ancient history and modern politics as a cautionary tale.

The book was finished and released by the time the 2020 election was in full swing. My analysis of history had gained more nuance. I viewed with a more critical eye the history of race relations in the U.S. with a critical eye, the never-retreating power of the fossil fuel, military industrial, and firearm lobbies, and the global  Imperial bases of the U.S. military. All of this fresh analysis influenced my writing. However, the historically bad first term of Donald Trump further bolstered my view, I believed, on saving history. I believed we could correct history, by electing correct choices once again and saving the American Empire, lest we lose the trajectory of progress and also pull the whole world into another Dark Ages. However, since the release of the book, I have become further radicalized.

A slow realization of an unpredictable march of history was settling in while a series of events took place that Status Quo Joe Biden predictably could not save us from, especially the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the re-election of Trump. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was the first time I witnessed a secured and fought-for right being stripped away. The re-election of Trump was an omen that his firm term was not an aberration, but a new norm to re-define U.S. politics for generations. It also meant some people voted for him, who had not voted against him four years prior due to the worst pandemic, worst race relations, and worst economy in over a century. Enough people forgot about the criminal January 6th Insurrection within four short years to deliver him the country's leadership to practice all the Fascism he wishes without any guardrails or checks this time. Lessons were not learned from the most recent history, let alone ancient history.

When I was sitting, a year ago, listening to the reader of the Declaration of Independence recite all the tyrannies of the king as listed by Thomas Jefferson and company, I was shocked to hear the words still resonate today. Grievances such as obstruction of justice, obstruction of naturalizations, and cutting off from the world are not new. I thought about the book I had published five years prior. Like the protagonist of the Alternative History, I was expecting my first-born. Also like the protagonist, I found myself inspired to fight. However, unlike said protagonist, what inspired me to fight was not seeing that a better world was possible, but a growing disillusionment and a radicalized view of the theory of change. If I were to rewrite the Alternative History, I would not write it like a utopia with no conflict (a struggle I wrote about in this blog post). I would write it as a power struggle because the only way to make a change is through power: building people power, infiltrating militaries and judicials, and having any leverage over the halls of power. I would write it as a never ending fight to secure additional progress and to safeguard the progress already secured, because the powerful agents that benefit from stripping rights away do not rest. I would write that the fall of the American Republic and Empire, much like the Roman Empire, is not only inevitable, but necessary for the next chapter to rebuild. WWHIRENF? Probably would have been a similar decline as the alternative, unless the consolidation of power was redistributed.