The title “Empress of India” was first bestowed on Queen Victoria in 1876, as a statement of royal dominion over Britain’s most valuable overseas province: India. It was, like many of Britain’s monarchic flourishes, primarily symbolic — an expression of Britain’s growing imperial character, following the formal annexation of India in 1857 — but it represented a significant change in the way Britain envisioned its Empire.

And so, when Queen Victoria, Britain’s monarch since 1837, accepted the title, it was an important moment. It was Britain’s final recognition of itself not as a network of commercial dominions but as an Empire, stretching across continents, ruled in the name of a single sovereign, and in doing so, it established the monarchy as the pillar of British national pride, which persisted even as the global empire itself faded into history.

The proclamation of the new “Empress of India” came with an official event: the Delhi Durbar. Taking place in New Delhi in 1877, the ceremony was of unrivaled pomp, and hosted every prominent official in British India, including the many Maharajas, Nawabs, and princes ruling as British vassals, prominent Indian intellectuals, and of course, Robert Lytton, the Viceroy of India. It was a time of jubilation: British hegemony was unquestioned, British grandeur was unmatched, and Indian wealth flowed in indefatigable golden rivers into London.

Queen Victoria did not travel to India for the Durbar, but a proclamation was read in her name to commemorate the moment:

We trust that the present occasion may tend to unite in bonds of close affection ourselves and our subjects; that from the highest to the humblest, all may feel that under our rule the great principles of liberty, equity, and justice are secured to them; and to promote their happiness, to add to their prosperity, and advance their welfare, are the ever present aims and objects of our Empire.

The attendees rejoiced. “Empress of India” medals, struck in honor of the event, were distributed. The many maharajas knelt before Lytton and the overhanging portrait of the Queen, paying homage to the newly-established British Raj, while their own British-commissioned self-portraits hung from the surrounding walls. Food, alcohol, and tobacco were in perpetual abundance, and for two entire weeks, Delhi was alight with continual celebration.

Nearing the end of the festivities, a small group of Indian nationalists, called the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, had their own citation read.

[We entreat] Her Majesty to grant to Indians the same political and social status as is enjoyed by her British subjects.

It was ignored.

Amidst the pomp and grandeur of the Durbar, India was undergoing one of the worst famines in its entire history. The Great Madras famine, lasting from 1876 to 1878, was reaching its peak in 1877, and it would eventually go on to kill over six million Indians. The direct cause of the famine was an intense drought in India’s breadbasket, the Deccan Plateau, leading a national shortage in grain and causing massive starvation across the subcontinent.

However, while the Deccan plateau is nominally fertile, drought in the area has been a recurrent historical phenomenon. Previous Indian rulers both expected and planned for grain shortages by stockpiling reserves during strong harvests, and building these grain reserves over years of fertility to prevent a human catastrophe in years of scarcity.

But the British, imposing their extractive economic policy onto India, oriented most Indian agriculture towards export. Where once exceptional harvests were stored as surpluses, they were now exported (at discounted prices, nonetheless) for resale elsewhere in the Empire. Indian agricultural productivity was actually higher than it had been before British rule — indeed, in 1875, the Viceroy Lytton celebrated the export of a record 320,000 tons of grain out of India — but capitalistic profit was prioritized over famine precautions, and the ever-present thread of a bad harvest was ignored.

And then, as famine struck, British relief policies were lacking to point of deliberate neglect. Rather than subsidizing emergency grain, Britain chose to allow market pricing, causing grain prices to skyrocket. Rather than making more relief available, the British increased the qualifications required for welfare to reduce expenditure on famine relief, with one MP stating it was “a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows.” And, as 1876 turned to 1877 and the famine still refused to abate, the British established “relief camps,” where undernourished Indian sharecroppers facing starvation were forced to perform backbreaking labor for an incredibly meager ration. Amidst this colonial genocide, the British administration continued to increase grain exports, continued to cut costs, and obstinately refused to raise the welfare ration for starving Indians, claiming it would introduce “dependency.”

And, of course, they hosted the aforementioned Delhi Durbar, where hundreds of wealthy British officials congratulated themselves on an Empire well ruled.

What, then, does the title of “Empress of India” represent? What exactly did Queen Victoria accept, when she chose to preside over the British Raj not simply as a monarch but as a sovereign holding imperial power over India?

The title, of course, is inflated. The word Emperor intentionally harkens back to Byzantium, where it was the moniker of divinely-granted absolutism, but we obviously cannot apply the same rubric to Victoria: she was a figurehead, her sovereignty mere spectacle, and she herself had little influence on policy.

And yet, the British monarchy represents the British people. As designed, it’s the symbolic ideal of the British nation and her subjects, and so necessarily, the actions of the British state reflect upon the monarchy. And so, when Queen Victoria accepted the title of Empress, she accepted symbolic guilt for the crimes of the British state. Her country had perpetrated genocide upon its own recently proclaimed subjects, in her own name, and if not her, the institution she represents has to accept culpability.

For in an Empire, posturing and symbolism are essential. The sovereign, in the traditional absolutism, serves at the behest of God, and her actions are the imposition of divinity, to whom she is responsible. The British had retreated from secular absolutism, but in styling themselves as an Empire, they still invested the monarch with symbolic and religious autarchy.

Then, Victoria, and the monarchic institution she represented, both are forever marked with the legacy of Britain’s many imperialist horrors, including the Indian famine of 1876. One cannot absolve Britain’s exemplar, its ambassador to the world, from the crimes committed in her name.

This wasn’t the only Durbar. Queen Victoria died in 1901 and was succeeded by her son, King Edward VII. He too, in accordance with the same Royal Titles Act, accepted the title of “Emperor of India,” and in 1903, in commemoration of his accession, a new, grander Durbar was held. This one, unlike the last, was opened to the public, and was an unparalleled show of pageantry and imperial power. An entire city was built from the ground, and hundreds of Maharajahs from across India came, bringing their entire courts and retinues. The Indian Army massed on Badli-ki-Sarai, the site of one of the Indians’ first defeats in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and jewels and wealth from India’s many age-old native imperial traditions were all displayed in triumphant submission to the British crown.

And yet, in the end, in a show of blatant arrogance, Edward VII decided against traveling to India, and instead sent his brother, the Duke of Connaught. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Indians remained in “relief” camps from yet another British-orchestrated famine in 1901, which the Durbar directly diverted resources from.

The menagerie that followed was reported on with disgust by the Indian press, as millions more died while the British fiddled in idle self-congratulation. It stoked the flames of nationalism ever further, intensifying calls for self-governance and advancing it as the only method of restoring Indian dignity.

But once again, the movement would be ignored — Indians didn’t have an actual say in government until after World War I, where the deaths of eighty-thousand Indians for the British cause shamed the mother country into offering a semblance of representation. And even then, the colonial administration remained primarily British-born and rejected further calls for self-rule as part of the “Black Raj,” a strikingly racist term that Anglo-Indians used to refer to any concessions made to Indian demands for representation.

But the most important of the Durbars, the one that came to epitomize both the British colonial rule in India, was the Durbar of 1911, which commemorated George V’s accession to the Indian Imperium. It was staged at the territorial height of the British Empire, when London was the world’s cultural and economic capital, just before Europe was plunged into World War I. And, it marked the first time a monarch deigned to arrive at their own imperial coronation, as George V traveled, with his imperial court, to India, to witness the prostration of an entire nation to his divinely-granted will.

In Mumbai, in commemoration of the first visit of a British monarch to his professed Indian dominion, the Presidency of Bombay erected the immense Gateway of India. Pictured above, the Gateway was a massive arch, in the tradition of triumphal arches dating back to the Romans (and more recently, Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe), and it was the ultimate symbol of British rule in India. It was built with Indian tax money, taken from the vast peasantry of Maharashtra, and, standing as it does at the heart of downtown Mumbai, it grew to represent the British crown and the colonial institutions it built to rule India. It’s an enduring landmark to the bloody century of British Raj.

The Gateway still stands. On the southern tip of Salsette Island, in the wealthiest part of Mumbai, it stands facing Mumbai’s harbor on the Indian Ocean. Across it sits the opulent Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai’s most exclusive hotel, and directly in front of it stands a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the King of the great Maratha Empire and a staunch nationalist resistor to British rule.

But in today’s world, the Gateway is an anachronism. It’s a symbol of subjugation, a reminder of a time when India wasn’t a nation but a possession; when Indian culture was suppressed and replaced with a mistaken belief in white, European superiority; when Indian soldiers bled and died for a country that still refused them the dignity of personal sovereignty.

Britain, since it stamped India with this grand, self-congratulatory monument, has seen a stunning reverse in its geopolitical reality. In 1911, it stood atop the world as its foremost power, with an empire that straddled the globe. British science and culture was the toast of all, and British military and economic supremacy was unchallenged. But now, in 2018, Britain has been reduced to a fragile nation struggling to assert itself in the European Union. Two World Wars, the Cold War, American supremacy, and decolonization have torn the British identity — forged in the days of global hegemony — asunder. Now, as Britain’s former colonies are overtaking their former mercantile master, its grand posturing seems anomalous and overblown.

From the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Britain controlled India. And the way they controlled it — arrogantly imposing their ideas of “civilization” and “modernity” upon an ancient culture that can trace itself back to the cradle of mankind — left a lasting stain. Even today, India struggles with ideas of whiteness and beauty. Centuries of British influence have made entire generations view their native Hindu culture as “backwards” and regressive. Indian nationalism, poisoned by years of imposed British segregation, now expresses itself violently and repressively, with religious rioting and separatism. Even Indian languages are suffering, as the young orient themselves towards English over their mother-tongues, believing it “modern” and “forward.”

British rule forced India to surrender its culture in the name of modernity, and left the country split, forced to choose between its rich history and its desire to industrialize and enter the global stage. That’s what the Gateway has come to represent today: a monument to both an exploitative past and a divided future.

But, while the Gateway still stands before India’s commercial capital, it has lost much of its gravitas. The dominance it once held over the Mumbai skyline has slowly been eaten away, as new skyscrapers — new towers for luxury condos and new office buildings for the many burgeoning corporations calling the city home — obscure it from view. Its former eminence, its symbolic importance for the British Raj, has been replaced by the growing capitalist fervor of a modernizing nation. Now, a landmark that awed a generation of Anglo-Indians has become camera fodder for India’s growing leisure class.

Much of Britain’s imperialist legacy in India has thusly been reinterpreted. The Victoria Monument in Kolkata, the India Gate memorial in Delhi, and many more, have had their potency as imperialist monuments stripped away by years of independence, and now remain as little more than tourist attractions, memorializing a history that has since been buried.

But there is one central component of the colonial legacy that cannot be reinterpreted: the British Crown. Past the Gateway, across the great blue plain of the Indian Ocean, the monarchy, the core of Britain’s imperial tradition — the very same one that presided over India and Kenya and Egypt and China — still persists today, in a nearly identical form. The vast Empire itself has since been dismantled, with many of its former subject nations expelling British influence and reclaiming their own identities, but the many monarchal traditions, which gained significance during the days of empire, continue unabated.

Royal Weddings are still an international spectacle, as are Coronations and Diamond Jubilees. Prominent British figures still kneel before the Queen for knighthood, and royal family still is spoken of with reverence throughout the British Commonwealth. Buckingham Palace still remains the official royal residence, having gained that distinction at Queen Victoria’s accession, and it stands prominently in central London, caged in by an immense fence circling the grounds. The Royal Guard still performs its anachronistically rigid routines just as it did a century ago, only with the classic Enfield rifles replaced with automatic M4A1’s. And the Koh-i-Noor diamond, stolen from the Punjab under the unequal Treaty of Lahore, still adorns the crown of Queen Mother Elizabeth.

Now, with the Empire several generations gone, with the throne bereft of even its symbolic powers, and with the myriad regnal rituals more resembling antiquated pageantry than displays of majesty, the only value the monarchy holds is as a memory. It harkens back to the days when Britain stood pre-eminent in the world, and now, it’s a living monument to the Pax Britannica — when Britain wasn’t an inflated regional power but the world’s epicenter.

But in that memory, in that time capsule so many wish to preserve, lie also the darker sides of Britain’s imperial tradition. For the British monarchy will always have the face of Empire. It’s not the people composing the monarchy, it’s not a matter of the personal opinions of the sovereign, but the legacy of the entire institution itself. It’s impossible to extricate the British throne from the many horrors perpetrated in its name, regardless of how removed we become from the age of Empire, and its continued existence is an affront to the millions that suffered under colonial rule.

Britain may have “decolonized,” renouncing its claims to foreign sovereignty, but it hasn’t undergone the cultural transition away from empire. This manifests in the monarchy, where the old imperialist sentiment yet reigns. The regnal titles, the idea of the “Commonwealth,” the condescending paternalism towards former colonies, all calcify into this odd middle-ground between a nation surrendering its place as global hegemon, but retaining a sense of cultural superiority — a royal hangover that, even with Britain’s fall from eminence, continues to needle its former subjects with its self-aggrandizing navel-gazing.

But this hangover must end. That institution that took the title of Empress of India, that denied Indians self-government and presumed to teach “civilization” to one of the world’s most ancient civilizations — that, to so many Indians, was the face of starvation and servitude — cannot continue without change. It is corrupt, poisoned by its imperialist legacy, and each day it persists, each Royal Wedding the world celebrates, each Royal heir the world permits, is yet another imposition of Britain upon the myriad peoples it exploited and subjugated.

What I’ll remember most about that day was the eerie quietude that permeated the entire office. People staring at their computer screens with paralyzed hands and wandering thoughts. Whispers jumping from person to person until an unspoken tension bore down on everything and everyone.

For an entire morning, the world seemed to stand still. Everyone at Snap, of course, knew this was coming. The news of the layoffs had leaked to TechCrunch and ReCode the day before, and the following evening, necessitated by the leaks, the entire company had received an email from the C-levels waxing poetic about shedding the crutches of the past and looking forward to the great beyond.

It wasn’t about saving money, they said. It was about trimming the fat: about turning Snapchat into something that could more effectively compete against the imposing giants it stood against. It was a life or death struggle, they said, and, if we weren’t lean and agile, if we weren’t aligning talent with our most central strategic priorities, we’d fall before the coming onslaught.

The dulcet days of open hiring, free spending, and rapid expansion were over, they said, to be replaced with responsibility, incremental innovation, and formal performance tracking. It was a new epoch.

It certainly didn’t feel like a new epoch. People that I’d worked with for months were now gone, given an immediate severance in exchange for their surrender of all personal grievances. Entire teams were gutted, their functions deprioritized, their projects de-scoped, their work discarded. Laptops were wiped and desks were cleared, and the assembly lines of newly-unowned glossy monitor screens reflected the anxiety of those that remained.

Every ten minutes, I’d turn around to see another emptied chair, another person walking up to the third floor. I tried to code, but no amount of stoic fortitude could return me to App Engine timeout errors. My mind flashed with visions of that fateful email from HR, the horrible realization that all I had given could be for naught, and I sat frozen to my desk.

And then, it was over. At 1:30, they called us all into the center common area, and told us that we’d survived. The layoffs had finished, and we had been chosen for the tremendous privilege of continued employment.

My first thought was relief. But that relief quickly turned back into fear. How disposable I was, I thought. How bound I was to the whims of others. So much of my life and wellbeing was in the hands of people who could easily and uncaringly take it all from me. And as I stood there listening to the propaganda blitz that those above had come up with to placate us survivors, I couldn’t stop thinking about how completely hollow my conception of my career and life was.

Because my entire life has been spent chasing after this exact goal. I spent most of high school sitting in my room reading and studying and programming, because I needed to get into Berkeley. I spent most of Berkeley doing problem sets and going to tech events and networking, and I spent every summer interning at a new place, slowly pulling myself up the cursus honorum of software engineering.

Every fall semester devolved into a mad race of interviewing and studying and anxiety and inferiority. I told myself that software engineering wasn’t a zero-sum game while secretly resenting everyone that looked to have made it, getting offers and passing interviews that I was seemingly incapable of.

Finally, at the end of the October of my senior year, I’d “made it.” I got an offer at Snap, with what seemed to me like a lot of money, and then spent the last month of senior year decompressing. I went home in December, endured four months of boredom and guilt from my family for moving away, and left for Los Angeles in April, knowing nothing and no one, buoyed only by the fact that this nervousness was the nervousness of the “successful.”

And after all that, there I was, listening to some executive tell me about how hard it was for them to let so many good people go. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I had done everything right to inoculate myself from this. I’d joined the right team, ingratiated myself with the right people, chosen the right projects, justified every decision in the context of our larger “strategic initiatives.” I’d been promoted from L1 to L2 in six months, and I was on track to hit the next level by the end of the year.

And yet, I had to stand there in fear, because to the people that made these cuts, none of this mattered. I could’ve had a bad week when performance reviews had gone through, nullifying everything I’d done, or my manager could have not adequately justified my existence to the directors above. I could’ve fallen victim to one of the many internal political struggles that so engross the string-pullers.

None of this had happened, but the point was, it could have. None of the above things are under my control, but they could’ve sealed my fate at any time over the past year, and if they did, neither my by-the-book background, my personal contributions, nor my sustained effort, would have mattered at all.

I would’ve been axed and replaced, and the world would have kept on turning.

But there’s a deeper meaning here beyond just the inherent futility of my own personal ambitions. I, as someone coming from a privileged family of upper middle-class immigrants, have been conditioned to the view the world as a struggle between “us” and “them.” My parents, who dragged themselves to success, identify heavily with the wealthy and powerful in America, as do many other self-made people. Choosing to believe in their personal agency justifies their own success as something of effort and perseverance, and gives the prospect of their approaching retirement a sense of narrative purpose: their lives’ natural prophecy coming to fruition.

For most of my life, I’ve believed the same. But walking home, blessed by the mercy of the decision-makers, the cracks in that worldview began to show. I had no power, I realized. I worked on a small part of a small part of a massive machine. I was replaceable. I didn’t do anything particularly unique, I didn’t have my name attached to something big, I wasn’t a member of that protected class of engineers that’ll always be guaranteed “Staff Software Engineer” titles and speaking invitations. I was, in short, a 22 year-old with ambitions that outstripped his achievements.

And in that sense, I was as trapped as every other person who’s forced to work for an income. My job offered shallow perks and self-affirmation, and that gave me the feeling that somehow I deserved anything I’d achieved: that I was, in any sense of the word, “successful,” and that working at a tech company was something more than just a paycheck. I was nothing, I realized, and in my hopes of actually accomplishing something, I’d deluded myself into thinking I already had.

Becoming upper middle-class in America is an achievement against adversity. It’s a triumph over the many established and growing forces aligning themselves against social mobility. And understandably, then, those that achieve prosperity construct narratives that encourage a gulf between those who’ve made it and those who haven’t. It’s a fantasy born of our human impulse to feel justified in our actions and secure in our livelihood.

And this feeling compounds in today’s America, as the once numerous paths to prosperity are narrowing to a select few. Fewer and fewer careers offer a stable path to the financial and personal security that underwrote the Baby Boomers’ “American Dream.” Technology is the one career that has an optimistic future, isn’t beholden by regulation and credential inflation, and actually attempts to create some sort of meritocracy, and so, those that are fortunate enough to be in it want to preserve the one island of paradise left.

But in doing so, we forget that while we’ve prospered, we haven’t achieved real security. Getting promoted in a white-collar job provides, but it’s a mistake to think it does anything more. Except for a very few, the security we strive for, and indeed, believe that we have, is denied to us. The upper middle-class, the professional class, that venerable example of American wealth and mobility, is as vulnerable to disenfranchisement as everyone else is.

Because you do not have power. Remember that, always. When you get promoted, when you enter management, when you get a stellar performance review, you are simply fulfilling the whims of someone else. Subscribing to the belief that there is some sort of power in being a well-ground cog is exactly what sustains our machine of systemic oppression, benefiting no one but those above.

Getting Laid Off In Tech was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve always hated February. It’s a completely terrible month. It’s when the romance vultures come out and start picking at my self-esteem with their promise of plasticized love wrapped in neatly-tied heart-shaped chocolate boxes. It brings back memories of cold winter mornings, where I’d walk to school blanketed in my six pound North Face jacket and still feel frostbitten by the time I reached the bile-blue school doors.

And, worst of all, it’s the central month of Oscar mania, where every day, respected news sources and TV channels turn out trash article after trash article about the bullshit opinions of 500 old white men, who meet once a year to decide the best and the worst of that year of cinema.

Or so they say.

In reality, the Oscars have become a dated and corrupt institution. Their choices are predictable and uninventive, anchored to some pretentious film conservatism that refuses to embrace the new and interesting. Each year, the same eleven actors and directors collect their trophies, and each year, the art worth remembering is ignored. And, the few times that the Academy deigns to recognize that most of the moviegoers of today aren’t seventy year-old geriatrics raised on Citzen Kane and Apocalypse Now, like last year’s win by Moonlight, their efforts feel like sympathy prizes, bones thrown to a flock of rabid dogs so they can shut up and let business continue.

“You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new, your only thought is to kill it?”

— Luv, a character in Blade Runner 2049, an amazing movie somehow not nominated for Best Picture.

That said, the root problem with the Academy isn’t solely that it refuses to acknowledge an increasingly diverse audience. Indeed, the fact that ninety-percent of the award winners are white men is a mere symptom of the disease. No, the root problem here is that the Oscars are hellbent on preserving some dying ideal of film culture that cannot and will not last the 2010s. This is the culture incubated in traditional film schools, and expressed in the traditional November/December releases of the “Oscar Movies.”

An “Oscar Movie” is a very particular style of movie, usually released in the latter months of the year, that’s designed and optimized to win awards. It usually has a historical setting, but one that’s pleasant and whitewashed and allows for escapism. It’s well-written but not edgy, and doesn’t force any self-reflection. It has beautiful shots but no interesting ones, it’s easy to watch but not quotable, it has great performances but none that are truly memorable. It’s a movie that has no obvious flaws, and because of that, it has no real strengths.

And above all, it’s a movie that feels prestigious and inaccessible for no reason besides the fact that it can. It’s a King’s Speech or a Dances With Wolves, and this year, it’s Phantom Thread.

Let’s take a deeper look at Phantom Thread, because it in many ways illuminates a lot of what I’m discussing here. In some respects, Phantom Thread is an exceptional movie. The script is polished and pristine, and the direction is technically perfect. And more subtly, the set and costume design is fantastic, completely capturing the 1950’s. Almost the entire movie is set inside rooms and corridors, and the camera perfectly creates a feeling of constant claustrophobic immersion as it weaves through the dense environments. Every shot is breathtaking, every line well-placed, every emotion unsaid.

And yet, it’s what it doesn’t do that sinks it. Phantom Thread doesn’t take many risks. It’s set entirely within its own arcane, insular world, and nothing there is designed to challenge the viewer. It flows from scene to scene seamlessly, but ends much like it began, with no real progression or change or impact or commitment. It’s a movie that has no reason to exist.

Look at Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, this year’s best Oscar nominee, for comparison. It’s funny, it’s dark, it’s new and novel, both in the subject matter and the way it’s presented, and above all, it has so much to say. There are no pointless homages to films long past, there’s no opportunity for pretentious film critics to wax poetic. There’s only substance.

Its present-day small-town setting strikes close to home in our still deeply-divided society, and it chooses to embrace reality, justifying anger and frustration instead of devolving into the basic feel-good resolution of “we all just need to love each other more.” And, it has the balls to joke about the horrible and the appalling and make it feel human, rather than resorting to the well-worn Oscar trope of remote moral disgust (see Schindler’s List).

And Three Billboards will never win. Neither will Get Out, the another exceptional Oscar nominee. Get Out is a movie that has so very much to say. In a society that elected Trump as president, it avoids the simple tack of lambasting the so-called “deplorables,” and instead turns the finger back on us, on the academy. It chooses to attack a much more insidious form of racism, the same form that Martin Luther King criticized in A Letter From Birmingham Jail: that of the unaffected moderate that masks their prejudice in manners and reverence. And it does so while being suspenseful and interesting and clever and funny, and so completely unlike anything a seventy year-old Academy voter would ever enjoy.

I suppose my biggest complaint about the Oscars is that they optimize for boredom. They penalize movies for attempting new things, and in their search for perfection, they end up rewarding the lukewarm over the passionate: the inoffensive over the interesting.

So, then, after all that, you’re asking what’s going to win Best Movie?

That’s a dumb question.

Here’s a better one: why do you give a fuck?

I lied. That wasn’t a better question at all. As much as I’d like to ignore the Oscars taking a shit on every cinematic achievement of every year, I’m forced to pay attention. Why? Because, as it turns out, events like the Oscars matter. People write down their choices in books and Wikipedia articles and remember them, and attribute value or lack thereof to movies based on them. A successful Oscar showing can give a movie new legs, launching it into new theaters and expanding its box office, while a poor showing can erase a good movie from history.

Yes, this isn’t always true. Everyone remembers Oscar snubs Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction, and The Social Network. But though it’s only been five years, do you remember American Hustle? You should. American Hustle was a fantastically written and directed movie that featured one of Christian Bale’s best performances, and yet, because the Academy found it less interesting than the tired narrative of 12 Years a Slave, it’s forever relegated to the end of the Amazon Prime Video movie recommendations.

Indeed, the oft-repeated advice of “just stop caring about awards shows and enjoy what you want to” is reasonable and yet completely irrelevant, because it presupposes that all awards shows will somehow be deficient and will not reflect the preferences of most people. But why shouldn’t they? Why are we forced every year to resign ourselves to being disappointed in the choices of our Awards shows? Why is it a foregone conclusion that the Pulp Fiction’s and The Shawshank Redemption’s of the world will never win over the Forrest Gump’s?

I have no solutions for you. There’s no real action that you can take, no moral stance that you can uphold, no protest that you can lead, that will really do anything to change the conservatism and stodgy stuffiness of the Oscars.

But hey, at least they aren’t as bad as the Grammys.

The top four teams, by win-loss record, of the 2017 NFL Season were:

1. New England Patriots, 13–3
2. Pittsburgh Steelers, 13–3
3. Philadelphia Eagles, 13–3
4. Minnesota Vikings, 13–3

So which team was the best?

At first glance this question sounds unanswerable. If win-loss records are a complete evaluation of team’s performance over the course of the season, then all these teams are equally good, and there’s no differentiation to be had.

But as anyone who watches any sports knows, this isn’t true. Even disregarding that the Eagles lost their starting quarterback, Carson Wentz, in week 14, you’d still see most fans place the Patriots and the Vikings above the Eagles and the Steelers. Why? Because there are clear differences in the way teams play: in their strategy, in their strengths and weaknesses, and their focuses throughout the game.

In short, every win isn’t created equal.

And so, people come up with ranking systems. The Ringer, FiveThirtyEight, those dumbasses who make a job out of yelling on First Take, all have developed a system to evaluate and rank NFL teams based on data outside their records.

These vary in quality. As anyone with half a brain could imagine, Skip Bayless’s reasoning is god-awful. ESPN’s are pretty good, in my opinion, and I think FiveThirtyEight’s ELO-based system is both really interesting and gives consistently reasonable predictions.

Today, I’m going to ignore all of those systems and make my own, based on fundamentally different reasoning. Why? Because I can.

Let’s start with an example. Imagine a league with three teams: X, Y, and Z. And let’s say this series of results happened:

1. X beat Y.
2. Y beat Z.
3. Z beat X.
4. Y beat X.

Then, with four games played, our three teams have the following records:

• X: 1–2
• Y: 2–1
• Z: 1–1

Our objective, then, is to assign each team a rating, R, that represents the true strength of that team.

First, let’s impose a constraint on every team’s rating:

That is, the probability that team X beats team Y is equal to its share of the total rating between those two teams. Then, we can arrive at the following:

The above states that the total probability of this season’s results is equal to the product of the probability of the outcome of each individual game. But, we know that these games resulted in the given outcomes: we observed them ourselves! So, the ratings that maximize the probability of our observed outcomes are the “true” ratings of each team.

That is, we want to find values for each R such that Pr(schedule) is maximized: the maximum likelihood estimate for the team ratings.

Actually finding this takes some math, which we’ll go through in the next section, but first, let’s think about this optimization problem intuitively. Imagine that you have three levers, each representing a team’s rating. We start with all three levers at 1, and then slowly start increasing X’s lever. You can see that X is both in the numerator and the denominator of the fraction we’re optimizing, so increasing it only increases Pr(schedule) to a point. We then jump to Y’s lever, and start increasing it until the value again begins to decrease. We then jump back to X’s, or move forward to Z’s, and so on, until we find the perfect balance between the three that maximizes the equation.

But of course, reality has no levers, and calculating our maximum takes math. We’re essentially going to derive gradient descent for this equation (and eventually, program it and run it!), which starts with finding a gradient.

Again, this is our equation:

The first thing you’ll notice is that this would be a frustrating expression to take the derivative of. We have division and multiplication, which will lead to some painful algebra. But, as it turns out, we don’t have any particular allegiance to this specific equation: we’d be fine optimizing an equivalent equation that’s easier to derive but behaves the same way as this one (that is, has the same extrema as this one).

I’m arbitrarily choosing the natural log, because it’s a monotonically increasing function that preserves the global extrema of the original equation, and it turns this complex blob of math into easier-to-handle additions and subtractions. Then:

With some algebra, this becomes:

The next step is to take the partial derivative with respect to each R in turn. I’m just going to give you these equations; verify my math if you’d like!

Now, we set each derivative to 0 (because we want to find the point at which the function is not changing, which in this function, is the maxima), and shuffle our equations into better forms:

And now we’re left with a system of three equations that represent the ratings for each of our teams. The obvious next step is solving this system, but even a cursory glance tells you that finding an algebraic solution would be quite difficult to arrive at, if not impossible. Matrix methods also won’t work here, as this is a nonlinear system that can’t be massaged into a better form.

So let’s step back for a second, and look at this differently. What if we just arbitrarily chose values for each R as an initial estimate? For example, let each rating be 1.

Then let’s plug those values back into each equation. That gives you:

What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that after one iteration of the above equations, we find that this is the current estimate of the maximum likelihood. And though it’s not a particularly good estimate, it already has expresses a lot of the intuitive ideas we discussed earlier. Y won against both X and Z, so it has the highest rating. X beat Y, but it also lost to Y, and it lost to Z, a team that Y beat, so it’s below Y. And Z is above X because it beat X and lost to Y, which X also lost to.

Now, we could run this same process again, plugging in these new R values and finding an updated estimate. There’s a whole century of academic literature, dating back to the 1920s, that states that eventually, these values will converge and you’ll find your maximum likelihood estimate.

Congratulations! You just ran gradient descent. Now, do the same thing, but for a full NFL season of 32 teams and 15 * 17 = 180 games.

Our math above solved for a crippled and abridged NFL season, but it’s easily extensible to a full season. Here are our final equations again:

Now, if you stare at this for a bit, you’ll be able to convince yourself that the general form of the above equations is:

where R_A is the rating of team A, W_A is the total number wins of team A, and G_Ω is the number of games A played against team Ω.

With our math above solved, we can finally write code to find maximum likelihood estimators for some real data. I’m going to use the 2017 NFL season as our example, and I’m going to write everything from scratch because again, I can.

Let’s start by first implementing the generalized rating equation that we want to optimize:

Here, current_weights is an array of length 32, initialized to 1 for our first iteration, where current_weights[i] is the current estimate for the rating of team i, games_matrix is a two-dimensional array such that games_matrx[i][j] is the number of times team i played team j, and wins_array is a one-dimensional array where wins_array[i] is the number of wins of team i.

Then, this is exactly the same as the equation we derived above. Now, to iterate it, we can do the following:

This function is fairly self-explanatory: it takes the games_matrixand wins_array params from above, initializes an current_weights array, and then while there’s still change between iterations, it travels along the gradient curve (that is our optimization_function) towards a local maxima.

Now, all we need is sample data! To achieve that, I used the incredibly helpful nflgame module, which pulls data from NFL.com’s GameCenter JSON feeds. Here’s the code below:

Now we can wire it all together:

Here are the results I got with the above code run on the 2017 NFL Season:

Pretty solid, I think. You can see ESPN’s final regular season power rankings here. Their top five were the New England Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers, Minnesota Vikings, New Orleans Saints, and the Los Angeles Rams, which is pretty close to mine, especially as we didn’t use any information beyond game results. (For example, I’m sure Carson Wentz tearing his ACL has a large bearing on the Eagles falling out of their top five).

The central problem with this method thus far is that it treats every victory as equal, and that’s simply incorrect. Should the Eagles’ narrow 15–10 win in the divisional round against the Falcons be treated the same as their 38–7 thrashing of the Vikings in the conference championship this past week?Obviously, it shouldn’t. The Falcons lost a narrowly contested game, while the Vikings were completely destroyed. Indeed, it seems like the Falcons’ rating should rise with these two results, as they lost closely to a team that the highly-rated Vikings were annihilated by.

The simplest metric to express this is margin of victory: the point differential between the winning and losing teams. And an easy way to incorporate that into our method would be, when calculating wins for each team, to weight larger wins more and lower wins less.

After some trial and error, I came up with this formula:

where D is the score differential and S is the total number of points scored. What this essentially says is that every win is automatically given 1/2, and then, we add a factor proportional to the difference in points. If D is close to S, meaning the winning team won by a lot, we end up with a number close to 1/2, which leads to the total win weight approaching 1. If D is much less than S, however, we end up with a win weight approaching 1/2.

Every win will end up somewhere on this spectrum, but it’s worth will be proportional to the amount the winner won by. Here’s how it looks in code:

Here, game is an object from the nflgame module, which contains data about a particular NFL game.

If you remember, we counted our wins in the generate_matrices function. Here it is again, but calling the wins_update_formula function instead of simply adding 1 for each win:

And of course, here are results:

They changed a bit. I’ll leave a full comparison to you, but New Orleans hopped up a spot, while Carolina fell. Minnesota is still our regular season favorite, but Philadelphia rose one, and Atlanta dropped a bit.

There’s a thousand things more you can do. Find a way to take into account home field advantage, or more granular offensive/defensive metrics. Find a more intelligent formula for weighting wins. Run this on a larger dataset and maybe find the best teams of all time. Compare a team’s average regular season rating to its postseason ratings (the only teams that probably have enough data for this are the Steelers and the Patriots). Fix my shitty code to run faster on larger amounts of data.

But before you do that, there’s a problem with my current method. My more statistically-knowledgeable readers probably realized already that there’s autocorrelation issue with incorporating margin of victory: the better teams will both win more often and win by larger margins more often, which will inflate our ratings over time. A solution to this would be to find a win update formula that weighs constraint of victory more when a lower-rated team wins and less when a higher-rated team wins. I’ll channel the stodgy professor in me and leave that as an exercise (hint: use the natural log, Luke!).

Here’s the repository containing all the code used in this article. Otherwise, you can find me on Twitter at @AakashJapi, email at aakashjapi at gmail dot com, and Facebook at the above name. Feel free to contact me with ideas/thoughts/nfl memes/Patriots trash talk, or anything at all.

Ranking NFL Teams Using Maximum Likelihood Estimation was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

November 9th, 1938.

In the late hours of that day, streets of cities across Germany erupted into anti-Semitic violence. The Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sturmabteilung (SA), acting on an order from Hitler himself, marched into the Jewish quarter of every town and wreaked destruction, while Hitler’s shadow-bureaucracy pulled the strings from above. Synagogues burned. Jewish-owned shops were vandalized and looted, their fractured display windows littering the sidewalks with glass. And, throughout Germany, the homes of Jewish families were systematically raided, robbed, and in many cases, razed to the ground.

Far from resisting, many fanatical Germans took part in the horror. In Esslingen, Nazi party members stormed a Jewish orphanage, threw books and religious insignia and children’s belongings into massive bonfires, and eventually burned the orphanage itself, leaving the children shivering in the cold autumn darkness. Hitler Youth members marched into Jewish cemeteries with sledgehammers and smashed the gravestones, in some cases exhuming the bodies, and the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass shook otherwise quiet residential streets nationwide as opportunistic neighbors took “revenge” on the Jewish families in their neighborhoods. Normal Germans, even the majority that disapproved, stayed locked in their homes, powerless. To speak against the pogrom would brand them as traitors, landing them in front of a judge for a sham-trial and then a sentencing to Buchenwald or Dachau, where they’d be labeled political dissidents and forced to perform backbreaking labor in starvation conditions.

The sunrise of November 10th highlighted a Germany ablaze. Where there were once homes, there was now ash. Sidewalks were crowded out by debris, remnants of the night’s destruction. In Berlin, where streets had become nigh impassable by the shards of shattered glass from destroyed Jewish storefronts, people started to call the pogrom Kristallnacht: the night of broken glass.

Thousands of Jews were forced to flee their ancestral homes, piling into trains headed for Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna. They carried little, their possessions stolen and their livelihoods burned. The many who didn’t or couldn’t leave cowered behind locked doors, terrified of leaving their homes for days after the pogrom. Almost thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and Nazi reports recorded that over a hundred had been killed (a number that almost-definitely is a drastic underestimate, at the minimum discounting the three hundred that committed suicide on seeing their lives destroyed).

For the Third Reich, Kristallnacht had been an unadulterated success. They had successfully fomented and executed a nationwide campaign of unbridled destructive fury against the Jews, extrajudicially detaining and murdering hundreds of them, and they hadn’t encountered any meaningful resistance. This emboldened the Nazis tremendously, and from here, it’s not hard to see the regime’s progression to the mass detention of Jews in Poland and Russia, the complete segregation and deprivation of Jews in all occupied territories, and eventually, in its last genocidal burst, the rise of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno, where almost three million Jews were systematically shot, gassed, or deliberately worked to death between 1943 and 1945.

The road to Kristallnacht, however, is a bit murkier, and is tied into a much broader question: how did the virulent anti-Semitism of the 1930s take such a hold in Germany? In the early postwar years, the central theory, advanced by the likes of William Shirer, was that the rise of militant anti-Semitism of the Nazis was a phenomenon unique to Germany itself: that Germany was unable to escape the dead weight of its history, and the long, prolific legacy of German anti-Semitism made the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust inevitable. This theory has a number of issues, the most prominent of which is that history rarely obeys neatly presented teleology, and attempting to fit it to an overarching narrative two major problems: first, it neglects the active decision of people in advancing anti-Jewish ideologies, and second, it discounts how completely unexpected the rise of Hitler was within and without Germany.

Indeed, it’s naive to believe that the anti-Semitism of the 1930s was somehow a phenomenon unique to Germany. Germany did have a long legacy of anti-Semitism and monarchic rule, but so did the rest of Europe. The first modern Jewish expulsion was actually done by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, and in the early 1900s, almost every nation had anti-Jewish strictures implemented in law. The Nazis also were one of many parties in the late Weimar Republic with anti-Semitic views, and actually, they were repeatedly forced to reduce their anti-Semitic rhetoric in the late 1920s/early 1930s for broader appeal. To say that Germany was somehow uniquely anti-Jewish, or that a catastrophe as large as the Holocaust could only happen in Germany, is a fallacy.

And yet, it’s one we hear constantly. After years of movies and books and propaganda, Hitler in the American cultural consciousness has been transformed in to a cartoon villain; an enigmatic evil, born of Satan himself, who launched a campaign of unrepentant murder upon the world. America’s role as the victor, and the ethos of the incurably optimistic 1950s that followed, led to the transformation of the Second World War from a conflict against the dangers of sectarianism and jingoism into a moral crusade against the singularly evil, one-dimensional, Nazis. The subsequent transition to the Cold War era, with its black and white moralities, completely buried all realistic understanding of how the Holocaust came to be under a mountain of propaganda.

And now, just past the seventy-ninth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the rise of the Third Reich has become a remote topic, one we reflect on as an example of human cruelty but not one we apply to our own reality. It’s too alien, too different, too far in the past to feel real to us. It seems that we’ve lost the essential truth: that a seed of sectarianism, unchecked by morality, can be the fount of unparalleled horror. It’s a deeply resounding loss in a world that’s starting to see the same nationalistic fervor as Germany did in the 1920s, the same sort of populism and undermining of democratic institutions that wrought so much destruction.

We know that if they [the Jews] come to power our heads will roll in the sand, but we also know that when we get our hands on power: “Then God have mercy on you!”

Adolf Hitler, 1923

That quote is from 1923, an important year for Germany. It’s the year Julius Streicher began The Stormer, the anti-Semitic newspaper that continued publication through 1945. It’s the year Hitler began Mein Kampf, his garbled, nearly unreadable personal manifesto about how the Jews are the perpetual antagonist of the German people, and racial struggle against them was the only noble goal of civilized man. It’s the year Hitler met Hermann Goring, who became an immediate ally, eventually standing next to Hitler atop the Nazi political structure. And, above all, it’s the year Hitler rallied two thousand Nazi party members, marched into Munich, and declared himself in putsch.

The Beer Hall Putsch, as it would later be known, failed. Hitler was arrested, the Nazis were broken up, and the Weimar Republic persisted. But it’s significant because it’s the day Nazism proclaimed themselves and their views of authoritarian dictatorship, vehement jingoism, and homicidal anti-Semitism to Germany, to the world — and Germany shrugged.

Hitler was given a five year sentence because, the court decreed, he was led by a “pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will.” He served nine months, and on release, returned to the business of breaking the world.

Why didn’t anyone care? Why was it that not only did Hitler go free, but he was able to return, rebuild his party from the ashes of a failed coup, and lead them to absolute power? The central reason was fear. Fear of humiliation by the hands of foreign powers once more, who’d neutered Germany’s economic and military power, and crippled it with the arduous yoke of reparations payments. Fear of the Bolsheviks and Socialists and radicals who sought to take what little property people had. And above all, it was the fear of starving, and being cast out of their homes and onto the unforgiving streets. For years of hyper-inflation and economic paralysis had nurtured a deep rooted sense of economic and personal insecurity that the well-intentioned but corrupt and ineffectual Weimar state was unable to resolve. And throughout the 20s, this feeling only worsened, as economic opportunity continued to contract while the government became ever more deadlocked.

When a nation is ruled by fear, when a people lack confidence in their own state in the world, where do they turn? The look outwards, searching for a reason, an outrage: something to blame. And that’s what Hitler gave them. He’d stand on his podium before an ever-growing audience and shout at Versailles and the allies for destroying Germany. He’d furiously rage against the Bolsheviks and Communists attacking Germany from within, taking the power away from the common man. And above all, he blamed the Jews. In Hitler’s mind, the Jews were the drivers of a vast international conspiracy to exploit and subjugate the German people. He heaped vitriol on them for the German failure in the First World War, and he said they and they alone polluted the true “Aryan” Germans and kept them bogged in the mud.

He gave the gave the downtrodden undercurrent of Germany a voice, and people were only too willing to listen.

Did that description of Germany sound familiar at all? It should’ve. Fascism, in general, takes certain forms that tend to broadly repeat themselves across history, and some of those seem to be resurfacing in modern America.

The core of fascism is always a central enlightened leader who can do no wrong, and who seizes absolute power for themselves. They’re usually a political outsider that rises from an extremist segment of party, and they use this status to rail against the corruption of the current establishment. Hitler, for example, was considered a political outsider, and many of his votes were protest votes, coming from people exasperated by the current establishment that he promised to overthrow. Similarly, Trump repeatedly made clear that he abhorred Washington, and Congress, and the neoliberal centrism of political mainstream, and stated a vote for him was a vote against that establishment: a vote to “drain the swamp.”

Fascism has also always been centrally linked to demagoguery. Hitler was consistently known for this. He gave strident, bold speeches, but couched his promises in vagueness. He never compromised: every proclamation was an absolute, every judgement was black or white (a certain Obi-Wan quote comes to mind). This is incredibly evocative of speeches Trump gave at his rallies when he ran for election. Every speech was loud and quotable, but lacked specificity. Trump had many slogans and tag-lines and rallying cries, but never gave serious policy suggestions. This was by intention. He created fervor, against liberals, against cultural relativism, against globalism, against the now, and used that to create fanatical support, but didn’t create specific policies that his opposition could anchor their dissent around.

And that brings us to the last point: fascist leaders always pine for a before, where “things” were “right,” before the world became “broken.” “Make American Great Again” is the epitome of this. Hitler, while he never did say “Make Germany Great Again,” drew his support from many former monarchal-conservatives and royalists who abhorred the parliamentary democracy forced on them. The “before” that Hitler referred to was the Wilhelmine Reich; for Trump, it has been the 1950s, when coal was big and provided for flyover America, when subversive liberalism was kept in its corner, and the powerful were white and male.

That last clause is important, because almost every statement from a demagogue venerating a past era is tinged with racism. Hitler was explicit with this: he blamed the Jews for the corruption of the now. In almost every speech, he railed against the International Jewry, conspiring against the Germans and the “Aryan” people. Trump is less explicit, probably to retain less fanatical supporters, but his message is no less apparent. He’s made awful statements about police brutality against blacks, he publicly insulted the parents of a Muslim war veteran, and he openly wishes for the world to return to an era when an entire race of people were subjugated and discriminated against. Racial and ethnic tensions, the core of every inter-generational culture war, arouse passion and are inherently divisive. Using them is a central part of assembling that fanatical following that every fascist depends on.

But while the patterns of fascism broadly repeat themselves, history in general does not. And indeed, it is fallacious to equate modern America with the Germany of the 1930s.

To start, the Weimar Republic is distinctly different from American government. The Weimar Republic was a government foisted on the Germans by catastrophic military defeat, and entering 1933, was the face almost two decades of economic hardship and governmental incompetence. American democracy, flawed as it may be, has stable and entrenched institutions, buoyed up by two hundred years of political tradition, and Americans still have faith in their electoral institutions.

And more importantly, Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by a mass of political violence, which by the late 1920s had become a central facet of the political culture of Weimar politics. Every major political party had their own paramilitary organization: the Nazi party commanded the SA, the left-leaning Social Democrats allied with the Reichsbanner, competing right-wing parties had the massive Steel Helmets, composed of disenfranchised World War I veterans. Many others also existed, and their clashes were regular and constant. Hitler quite literally assaulted his opponents and forced them to abdicate their opposition.

America, on the other hand, has protests and social unrest, but the primary form of political demonstration is peaceful. Sure, we have occasional politically motivated violence, but it’s perpetrated by fringe extremists like Antifa or the KKK, and it’s censured by all sides of the spectrum. Indeed, America’s greatest achievement is that partisan politics has never resulted in this establishment-sponsored and driven form of political violence, and I believe this tradition will endure.

All things considered, it’s unlikely America will fall backwards into dictatorship from Trump alone. Our institutions have weathered greater tensions, and we still have a solid core of republican faith that will not be so easily turned to a demagogue.

But all things start somewhere, and the events of the past year are forming a dangerous trend, where growing ideological polarization is opening deeper divides in society. Leftists and conservatives, urban dwellers and rural farmers, educated coastal liberals and soon-to-be-automated factory workers, all are aligning themselves against each other, forming the cores of two oppositional political forces that constantly clash. Globalization has created a gulf in American society, which is reflecting itself in our culture and our politics and our society.

Every characteristic of fascism described above, at its core, aims to exploit the divisions inherent in a heterogenous society. It widens the gulfs between people and exploits their narrow-minded passions to promote autocracy and xenophobia. This can happen within a democracy; indeed, fascism tends mostly to rise from democracies, which, in allowing political opposition, also allow for the growth of demagogic populism.

Democracies depend a great deal upon a complex system of dependency between governmental branches, and this leaves them weak to executives with popular backing. We’ve seen this before, when Andrew Jackson used his overwhelmingly popularity to overrule the legitimate rulings of the Supreme Court to forcibly remove the Cherokee into Oklahoma. And we’re seeing it now, with the ineffectiveness of the courts and the legislature (and in general, the people) in checking the power of Trump.

And so, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, and in the general, the cynical transformation of ethnic and racial tensions into a top-down, government-imposed, system of discrimination and segregation and subjugation, is not nearly as remote a possibility as we imagine it to be. Discriminatory laws, scapegoat-creating propaganda, radicalized, fanatical populism, destructive racial pogroms, and aggressive, nationalist foreign posturing, the policies that formed the core of Nazi rule, have happened over and over again throughout history, and can happen again. We have to always be vigilant, ready to resist governmental and personal overreach, and prevent the undermining of our globalized, heterogenous democracy through jingoism and hate. For the result of these policies, taken to their logical extreme, is always Auschwitz and Treblinka and genocide and death.

I don’t mean to turn the greatest tragedy in a century littered with horrible tragedies into a simple call-to-action. For the Holocaust, when studied, when truly studied, isn’t something that arouses fervor: it brings about disgust, and horror, and above all, despair. It makes you appalled that man ever was capable of performing such terrible things to fellow man. It makes you appreciate that we live in a place that where such things feel remote and unimaginable.

Because while Nazism has been clearly defeated, and will never rise again, the world itself is still prone to petty sectarian violence, and man has not improved very much in his treatment of fellow man. Look at Yemen today, where thousands are rendered refugees by a proxy war between two religious rivals. Or look at Congo, where exploitative Belgian colonization created a country that was impoverished and uneducated, and left it to suffer under forty years of kleptocratic rule and ethnic conflict. And so many others. The same things that motivated the Holocaust still exist in the world today, if you keep your eyes open.

It’s a tautology to say that the world hasn’t improved; that there still exists much evil; that man is still man. But when we give into this cynicism: when we, from our positions of unearned privilege, ignore the world, we become bystanders, complicit in the wrongs that are wrought by others.

The vigilance I discussed earlier is an active vigilance. It’s the vigilance of a people that consider suffering to be unnatural, that fight to make it nonexistent. It’s the vigilance of those that try to rise above the default self-centeredness that governs most of our lives. It’s the cry of a generation that neither accepts or rejects the establishment, but dismantles it altogether, so another, better one can be built in its stead.

I leave you with this heartbreaking composition by Ilse Weber, a Jewish poet who voluntarily went to Auschwitz because she couldn’t bear letting her son, Tommy, die alone.

Farewell, my friend, we have come to the end

Of the journey we took together.

They’ve found me a place on the Polish express,

And now I must leave you for ever.

You were loyal and true, you helped me get through,

You stood by my side in all weather,

Just feeling you near would quiet every fear,

We bore all our burdens together.

Farewell, it’s the end; I’ll miss you my friend,

And the hours we spent together.

I gave you my heart, stay strong when we part,

For this time our farewell’s for ever

Ilse Weber died with her son in October 1944. Her husband, Willi Weber, succeeded them by 30 years, and died in 1974.

May they rest in peace.

Sources

• The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
• The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans
• The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans

Aakash Japi (@AakashJapi) | Twitter

Kristallnacht, 79 Years Later. was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.