Dealing with the Holocaust
1. White Nationalists need to deal with the Holocaust just as we need to deal with the Jewish Question in general.
It is futile to focus on White advocacy alone and ignore the Jews. Quite simply, the Jews will not return the favor. You might not pick Jews as the enemy, but they will pick you. You might wish to see Jews as Whites, but Jews see themselves as a distinct people. Thus they see any nationalism but their own as a threat.
2. It is futile for White Nationalists to ignore the Holocaust, for the Holocaust is one of the principal tools by which Jews seek to stigmatize White ethnic pride and self-assertion. As soon as a White person expresses the barest inkling of nationalism or racial consciousness, he will be asked “What about the Holocaust? You’re not defending genocide, are you?”
The Holocaust is specifically a weapon of moral intimidation. It is routinely put forward as the worst thing that has ever happened, the world’s supreme evil. Anybody who would defend it, or anything connected to it, is therefore evil by association. The Holocaust is evoked to cast uppity Whites into the world’s deepest moral pit, from which they will have to extricate themselves before they can say another word. And that word had better be an apology. To borrow a turn of phrase from Jonathan Bowden, the Holocaust is a moral “cloud” over the heads of Whites.
So how can White Nationalists dispel that cloud? We need an answer to the Holocaust question. As a New Rightist, the short answer is simply this: the New Right stands for ethnonationalism for all peoples—what Frank Salter terms “universal nationalism.” We believe that this idea can become hegemonic through the transformation of culture and consciousness. We believe that it can be achieved by peaceful territorial divisions and population transfers. Thus we retain the values, aims, and intellectual framework of the Old Right. Where we differ is that we reject Old Right party politics, totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide.
The idea of ethnonationalism is true and good, regardless of the real and imagined crimes, mistakes, and misfortunes of the Old Right. Thus we feel no need to “deny,” minimize, or revise the Holocaust, just as the New Left felt no need to tie its projects to “Gulag revisionism.”
3. What is the Holocaust? I understand the Holocaust to mean the claim that up to six million European Jews were put to death during World War II by the Third Reich and its allies as part of a policy of systematic and intentional genocide, i.e., the extermination of a whole people or group.
What is revisionism? History is what really happened. Historiography is the record and interpretation of history created by finite and fallible human beings. As we discover new historical facts and the lies, errors, and biases of past historians, we must accordingly revise historiography. Historical revisionism is simply the process of criticizing historical narratives to bring them in line with historical facts.
Historical revisionism is, in principle, an infinite task, for every historian interprets limited data within particular frameworks. But data can always change, and interpretations can always be questioned. Revisionism is, therefore, a necessary and permanent feature of the pursuit of historical truth.
Holocaust revisionism primarily challenges the facts of the Holocaust narrative, usually focusing on death totals and techniques of extermination. Holocaust revisionism is a completely legitimate field of historical inquiry, simply because all historical narratives are subject to revision.
Beyond that, revisionism about wartime atrocities is necessary because wars always generate propaganda, and much of war propaganda is untrue. In the case of the Holocaust, for instance, the old stories about human soap and lampshades have now been recognized as false even by mainstream historians, including Jewish historians. And so many Holocaust memoirs have been unmasked as false that they constitute a whole new literary genre.
Holocaust revisionism is not the same thing as revisionism about the Third Reich or the causes, conduct, and consequences of World War II. Nor does it constitute Holocaust revisionism to compare the Holocaust to other genocides or discuss its overall meaning.
For instance, Irmin Vinson’s Some Thoughts on Hitler, deals with the role of the Holocaust in stigmatizing and suppressing White racial consciousness today. But it is not a revisionist account of the actual events of the Holocaust. Similarly, the events of World War II are irrelevant to Kevin MacDonald’s point about the preeminent role of the Holocaust in contemporary Western culture: “Central to the new culture is the elevation of Jewish experiences of suffering during World War II, collectively referred to as ‘the Holocaust’, to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western societies. … The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests not only as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups —prototypically the Jews, but also as an instrument to silence opponents of high levels of multi-ethnic immigration into Western societies” (see here, p. 44, 45).
Just so we are clear: I believe that Holocaust revisionism is a legitimate field of historical research, because all forms of historical revisionism are legitimate, due to the necessarily partial, finite, and therefore revisable nature of historiography. I believe that all laws that penalize Holocaust revisionism should be scrapped as anti-intellectual, quasi-religious obscurantism. I believe that all revisionists should be released from jail. I have met many leading revisionists, and with only a couple of exceptions, I think they are honest and honorable people. I wish them well in their endeavors.
I am not arguing that we should avoid Holocaust revisionism because it will garner bad press. I don’t worry about such things, because we will always have bad press—until we control the press.
I simply wish to argue that Holocaust revisionism is not a necessary component of our intellectual project. We don’t need it. Which is not the same thing as saying that it is a hindrance, or that it cannot help under any circumstances, although I will argue that it is often a distraction.
Personally speaking, since becoming involved with the White Nationalist scene, I have never been all that interested in Holocaust revisionism, simply because my main concern is with the genocide being committed against our own people today, not the real or imagined crimes committed by our people in the past. And the Holocaust strikes me as having little to do with the deep causes of our racial plight and even less to do with the solutions.
4. There is a weak sense in which Holocaust revisionism is not necessarily connected to White Nationalism, namely they have very different aims which makes them very different endeavors. The proper aim of Holocaust revisionism is historical truth. The aim of White Nationalism is the creation of White homelands. Although the ranks of revisionists and White Nationalists overlap, there is no necessary connection between these two aims. Which is not to say that they necessarily conflict.
For instance, there are Holocaust revisionists who are not White Nationalists, such as Bradley Smith, Robert Faurisson, and Roger Garaudy. And there are White Nationalists who are not Holocaust revisionists. Indeed, there are some who hope that the revisionists are wrong.
Others, like me, simply hold that revisionism, whether true or false, is simply not necessary to the White Nationalist project. The standard account of the Holocaust could be completely true, and it would still not imply that there is anything wrong with White Nationalism and the goal of breaking Jewish power over our destiny and physically separating Whites and Jews.
Of course for German and Austrian nationalists, particularly those who want to rehabilitate old-style National Socialism, there seems to be an inextricable connection between Holocaust revisionism and their practical political aims. But I wish to argue that even in this case, Holocaust revisionism is not necessary for German and Austrian nationalism to reemerge from the flames.
Nothing prevents German or Austrian nationalists from saying:
“If the lessons of the Holocaust are that genocide is evil and the best defense against genocide is to have one’s own state, then we think this lesson applies to us too. We will cease to exist as a people if we do not have control over our own borders and destinies. It is time for a new nationalism. We simply refuse to tie our destiny to what happened in the Second World War. We’re over it. We’ve moved on. Jews are no longer being subjected to active, ongoing genocide, but we are.”
So if one’s goal is historical truth about the Holocaust, to rehabilitate National Socialism and the Third Reich, or to cleanse the German people of blood libels, then Holocaust revisionism makes perfect sense. Nothing else will really do. But if one’s aim is White Nationalism, Holocaust revisionism is not necessary.
5. Those who argue that Holocaust revisionism is a necessary component of White Nationalism usually claim that the Holocaust is the foundation of the post-World War II regime of anti-White genocide.
The Holocaust really is the principal source of White guilt, the principal tool to stigmatize White national and ethnic consciousness.
What are the “lessons” of the Holocaust? The Holocaust is used, simultaneously, to justify Jewish racism, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish self-assertion and to stigmatize White racism, nationalism, and self-assertion.
Thus, some White Nationalists reason, if the principal claims about the Holocaust could be refuted — if the death toll could be lowered, if the homicidal gas chambers could be exposed as a myth, etc. — then the whole racket of anti-White guilt and extortion would crumble.
But is this true?
Revisionists have been chipping away at Holocaust claims since 1945. The shrunken heads, human soap, and human lampshades have been quietly withdrawn. The homicidal gas chambers have migrated from Germany and Austria to Poland. Death tolls at individual sites have been revised downward. Scores of fake memoirs and testimonies have been unmasked. And all of these findings have been accepted by mainstream historians.
Yet has this decreased the cultural power of the Holocaust over Whites? Maybe it has slowed the juggernaut down a bit, but it is still rolling over us. Furthermore, I see no effect on broader Jewish cultural and political hegemony, which has never been stronger.
Of course if the revisionists could score a major hit — if, for instance, they are right about the gas chambers at Auschwitz — there is no question that the Jewish establishment would suffer considerable embarrassment and loss of credibility and prestige in the eyes of Whites. That certainly couldn’t hurt White Nationalism. But would it really constitute a decisive blow against Jewish power?
I think not, for the following reasons.
- First, as Mark Weber has pointed out, the cultural and political power of the Holocaust is not the foundation of Jewish power, it is an expression of pre-existing Jewish power. Before World War II, Jews already had an enormous amount of power in the United States (see here, p. 9ff): enough power to deliver the United States into two World Wars, for instance. Jewish power was based on over-representation in banking, business, law, politics, academia, and the news and entertainment media.
- Second, if the Holocaust suddenly lost its potency as a tool of moral intimidation, Jews surely have the talent, money, power, and ill-will to foist a new one on us. Whites will never be free until we identify and defeat the real sources of Jewish power. And from that point of view, focusing too much on the Holocaust is superficial and can function as a distraction. The Holocaust is like the toreador’s red cape. We bulls need to stop charging the cape and start focusing on the man who wields it.
- Third, Holocaust death totals are never going to be revised to zero. In a war in which countless innocent people of all nations died, countless innocent Jews surely died as well, and ultimately that’s all the Holocaust needs to survive. The gas chambers, the genocidal intent, and the rest of it could be dropped, but poor little Anne Frank and many others like her would still be dead.
- Fourth, the pity for innocent Jewish victims that our people feel will not be altered even if they are convinced that many Holocaust survivors and the Allied powers exploited their deaths for political and financial gain and embellished them with outrageous blood libels against the German people. The victims told no lies about the Holocaust (soap, lampshades, etc.). The survivors did. The Allied governments did. The Jewish leadership did. But dead men tell no tales.
- Fifth, if many key Holocaust claims were proven false, Holocaust survivors could still present themselves as victims, this time of the Allied powers that fabricated German atrocities to retroactively justify their own war crimes. Jews who were duped into thinking that their entire families had been exterminated might well have lost the opportunity to find their loved ones because they believed them to be dead.
- This would actually be a political windfall for Jews, because Jews have worked very hard to make all Whites feel a spurious guilt for the Holocaust, even the citizens of the Allied powers that brought the Holocaust to the end. If, however, the Allies fabricated key elements of the Holocaust narrative, then they really would be guilty of a great crime against the Jews, opening up vast new prospects for reparations.
- Sixth, the Holocaust may be the anti-White guilt trip most useful to Jews — since it simultaneously supports their nationalism and undermines ours — but it is certainly not the only one. There are all too many Whites who are happily abasing and immolating themselves for such historic crimes as Negro slavery, the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples around the globe, even the extermination of countless animal species. Some Whites seem almost eager to believe that our ancestors exterminated the Neanderthal, so they can feel guilty about that as well. Of course it would be nice to set the historical record straight on all these issues, but the real problem here is moral.
6. It is our own people’s grandiose propensity toward collective guilt and self-abasement that is the ultimate source of the Holocaust’s power over us. No amount of Jewish propaganda could sell us the “lessons” of the Holocaust if we were not willing to buy them. The real problem of the Holocaust is moral and psychological, and historical revisionism simply does not address it. It is a problem that can only be addressed by moral and psychological means. Unless we deal with the real root of the problem, Whites will be just as willing to abase and ruin themselves over 600,000 dead Jews as over six million.
The fact that the ultimate problem lies in ourselves does not, however, absolve the organized Jewish community of guilt for exploiting it to serve evil ends.
Just to be clear, I am not objecting to feeling sympathy with the victims of injustice. Nor am I objecting to feeling shame for one’s own misbehavior or the misbehavior of others, especially those who act in one’s name. These are signs of moral health.
What I object to is collective guilt and collective atonement: the idea that Whites today are collectively guilty for what Whites have done in the past and must collectively atone for those crimes. I believe there are collective goods and evils. I am all for collective pride and collective shame. But I do not believe in collective guilt. Individuals are only guilty of the things that they do, even when individuals act in groups. It is perfectly reasonable to feel pity and shame for the extinction of the dodo or great auk. But I am not guilty of actions taken by others long before I was born.
One of the most disgusting but least harmful manifestations of collective guilt and atonement is the issuing of collective apologies for past wrongs. The King of Spain, for instance, was asked to apologize for the Reconquista, i.e., the reversal of the Moorish conquest of Spain. A healthy people would have responded to such insolence with laughter (and tossed whoever suggested it down a well, for good measure). After all, where is the Moorish apology for the Conquista?
Then there is the group of White Christians who marched around wearing chains and yokes in the custody of blacks to apologize for the slave trade. Of course, Muslims, Jews, and African blacks felt no need to apologize for their people’s roles in the slave trade.
It is this mentality that has allowed Jews to fashion the Holocaust into a kind of moral fetish from which Whites shrink like vampires from the cross.
The moral and psychological effect of collective guilt is collective demoralization and self-hatred, which leads to a loss of a collective destiny. We no longer think that the world is a better place because of our people, that we have something good to contribute to the universe.
A whole book could be written about the consequences of White demoralization. I believe it is a factor in everything from lower birthrates to miscegenation to our willingness to subject ourselves to annoying music.
But the most important consequence of White demoralization is our unwillingness to take our own side in ethnic conflicts with every other group on the planet. And, as Michael Polignano has argued so cogently, refusing to take one’s own side in an ethnic conflict is the path to collective dispossession and extinction. (This is why our enemies promote such attitudes in the first place.)
Our morality has made us sick, rotten, weak, and contemptible, and only a moral revolution—what Nietzsche called a transvaluation of values—will save us. This is not the place to fully explore that transvaluation. But I will touch on how it relates to the Holocaust question.
7. Not only does Holocaust revisionism fail to deal with the moral roots of the problem, it actually subtly strengthens them. Both Holocaust promoters and revisionists share a common premise: If White ethnocentrism, self-assertion, etc. led to the Holocaust, the slave trade, Jim Crow, etc., then they are evil. Revisionists do not challenge the moral part of this premise, they simply dispute the facts.
But the most fundamental response is to deny the moral premise: There is nothing wrong with White racial nationalism, self-assertion and White concerns about the future of their race. These do not necessarily conflict with the legitimate interests of other peoples, and in cases when our interests conflict with theirs, it is perfectly correct to take our own side. Attacking the moral dimension of the problem is like hacking at the trunk of a tree, whereas revisionism is akin to merely trimming the branches.
8. There is a sense in which the past simply does not matter to a people of sufficient vitality and destiny. Yes, we should honor our heritage. Yes, we should learn from history. But no healthy people should allow the past to turn into a dead weight impeding them from pursuing a better future.
From the point of view of a vital organism, memory should be as selective as the digestive process, which separates nutrients from poisons and dross, absorbing the nutrients and excreting— i.e., forgetting—the rest as swiftly as possible.
Individuals who have a long memory for negative things, like people with slow bowels, are sickened by retaining wastes that should be excreted. The same is true for whole peoples. Great men and great peoples need to have a capacity to forget the negative so they can get on with life.
The bigger the memory, the smaller the man—the longer the memory for slights, the pettier and sicklier the soul. The bigger the past, the smaller the future. The more tied to the past one is—especially past negatives—the less vitality one has, the less ability to project a future.
And, to extend the analogy one step further, people who constantly harp on past negatives are trying to make you eat the psychic equivalent of excrement. They are trying to poison you. They do not have your best interests at heart.
Sure, it is good to set the historical record straight. But from the point of view of the existential, practical project of securing the existence of our people, it is not necessary. Because mere historical facts — no matter what they are — should never deter us.
9. Part of the power of the Holocaust is the idea that it is history’s greatest crime, the worst thing that ever happened. This is a factual claim, which can be easily refuted. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao each killed more than six million people. (As many as 15 million people died in the USSR under Lenin’s leadership, during the revolution and civil war, before Stalin came to power.)
Tinkering with Holocaust death totals is obviously relevant to where the Holocaust fits into the hierarchy of human atrocities. Does it come before or after the millions of German civilians killed during and after World War II by the Allied powers? How does it relate to the 1.5 to 4 million people who died in the Bengal famine of 1943, caused by the British? How does it compare to the some two million Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Greeks who were killed by the Turks between 1915 and 1920, or the 1.7 million Cambodians were killed by Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979?
But from a Jewish point of view, such tinkering is irrelevant, because whether the death toll is six million or 600,000, the Holocaust is still the worst thing that ever happened to Jews.
The problem is that Jews have gotten the rest of us to accept the Jewish view of the Holocaust as the only view, the view of “humanity,” which for a Jew means only Jews, but for Whites means everyone. Whites need to develop our own perspective on the Holocaust.
From a general human point of view, Holocaust numbers are irrelevant as well, because even if 16 million Jews perished in the Second World War, it is certainly not the worst thing that ever happened to the human race. That would be Communism.
From a White point of view, Holocaust numbers are irrelevant too, because the worst thing that has ever happened to our race has also claimed far more than six million lives. That would be the rise of Jewish power over Whites, whenever and wherever it has occurred, including Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the delivery of the United States into the First World War, playing a major role in fomenting World War II, and playing a leading role in establishing the post-war system in which low White birthrates and the immigration of fast-breeding non-Whites threaten White peoples the world over with political dispossession, cultural obliteration, and, if present trends continue, biological extinction.
But even if the Holocaust were the worst thing that ever happened, (a) it is not our fault and (b) we have our own, slow, ongoing genocide to worry about. So, in the end, do the numbers really matter to a people with the will to have a future?
10. The most urgently touted lesson of the Holocaust is that Whites had better not contemplate separating themselves from Jews ever again, lest it lead to “another Holocaust.” But this doesn’t really follow.
- First, if it really were a matter of “us or them,” any healthy people would take its own side.
- Second, Jews have been expelled many times from White lands, and not all of these expulsions resulted in massacres. Some of them probably prevented massacres.
- Third, Jews now have some place to go: a homeland that will not refuse them refuge.
- Fourth, Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons which will effectively deter any future massacre of Jews.
11. From a practical, political point of view, Holocaust revisionism is a rather clumsy way of dealing with the Holocaust question.
Imagine you are protesting some evil done by Jews and you are told that Jews have a right to do x because of the Holocaust. Do you splutter that the Holocaust is a “hoax” and then start disputing the numbers? Or do you simply say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right”?
Imagine that you are passing out anti-immigration literature and somebody comes up to you and tells you “What you’re doing is just like what led to the Holocaust.” Do you bring up the Leuchter Report? Or do you simply say, “Unless we don’t stop immigration, White people have no future in this country, and that’s genocide too. We’re fighting against our own ‘Holocaust’”?
The first response is moral. The second can be characterized as political. As a general rule, moral and political arguments are more convincing than historical or scientific arguments, because the latter require specialized knowledge and lengthy explanations, whereas the former can be pithily formulated and draw upon common moral and political intuitions—and generally people’s moral intuitions are healthier than the toxic moral swill ladled out by the churches, schools, and mass media.
12. Generally the “lesson” of the Holocaust boils down to: Jewish racism, nationalism, and self-assertion are good; White racism, nationalism, and self-assertion are evil. The flaw in this position has nothing to do with historical facts. It is simply the glaring moral double standard, which is the essence of Jewish tribal morality. The position is perfectly consistent with Jewish live and let die morals, since both sides of the double standard benefit the Jews.
The White answer should be, for starters, to point out the double standard. But one cannot stop there, simply adopting a posture of naïve, aggrieved universalism. One should also point out that Jews are quite aware of such double standards and quite pleased with them: they are essential to the Jewish moral outlook. Jews are morally different people, and we need to recognize this.
But the answer is not to adopt our own version of Jewish ethics—preaching universalism for them while practicing ethnocentrism for us—for at least six reasons.
- First, Jews aren’t as naive as Whites, so they would never buy it.
- Second, Jews can afford to maintain moral double standards because they have the power to make them work for them. Whites do not have that kind of power, so there is nothing to gain by sacrificing our consistency.
- Third, our fellow Whites have a strong predisposition toward universalism, and flouting it makes our task that much harder.
- Fourth, Whites tend to be outraged at violations of universality and reciprocity. Why not channel all of that outrage toward our enemies rather than share in it ourselves?
- Fifth, philosophically speaking, ethnocentrism, ethnonationalism, and ethnic self-assertion are completely universalizable principles. They can be accepted by all peoples. The New Right stands for ethnonationalism for everybody.
- Finally, Jews have invested a great deal in genocide education and awareness. Why not make that work for us, for a change?
If the lesson of the Holocaust is that peoples need their own states, ethnic pride, and ethnic separation in order to preserve themselves from genocide, then Whites need to demand that this principle be applied to us as well, for although Jews have never been more secure—with their ethnostate sitting on a mountain of nuclear weapons—Whites in all nations are faced with declining birthrates and teeming populations of non-White invaders, trends incompatible with our long term survival. That is genocide too, as defined by the United Nations. White Nationalism is all about resisting White genocide.
Followers of Bob Whitaker’s mantra have made an important contribution to White Nationalism by injecting the White genocide meme far and wide into the culture. Clearly they understand that they will have a greater impact by building upon genocide awareness rather than trying to nibble away at its edges with Holocaust revisionism. And one can do this in all earnestness, because, after all, genocide really is evil.
13. Holocaust revisionism is illegal in 17 countries and counting. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Roger Garaudy, Jean Plantin, and Robert Faurisson have been imprisoned and/or fined for Holocaust revisionism. In Germany, Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Sylvia Stolz, Horst Mahler, Dirk Zimmerman, and Bishop Richard Williamson have been imprisoned and/or fined. Zündel and Mahler were sentenced to five years. In Switzerland, Jürgen Graf, Gerhard Förster, and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz have been imprisoned and/or fined. In Austria, David Irving and Wolfgang Fröhlich have been imprisoned, the latter for six years. Others have been forced into exile.
One might argue that no one bans what he does not fear. Thus if Holocaust revisionism is banned, it must be feared by our rulers. One could make the same argument about the criminal assaults, bombs, arson, loss of employment, professional harassment, and social ostracism to which Holocaust revisionists have also been subjected.
But the fact that Holocaust revisionism is persecuted still does not imply that it is a necessary or effective component of White Nationalism.
Moreover, Holocaust revisionists who have no ties to White Nationalism have also been persecuted. Furthermore, fear is not the only motive for persecution. Hatred probably plays a bigger role. The Holocaust is a highly emotional topic among Jews. Thus Revisionism would probably be persecuted even if it bore no connection to any particular political agenda and threatened no political powers.
Finally, if White Nationalists who do not link themselves to Holocaust revisionism become more effective (as I think they will), then they might have even worse persecutions in store.
14. To sum up, I have argued that White Nationalists need to deal with the problem of the Holocaust. I have argued that the root of the problem is our people’s willingness to accept unearned guilt and punish ourselves for it. The problem, in short, is psychological and moral, not historical. Thus Holocaust revisionism is not the answer. It is not necessary for White Nationalism. At best, it can supplement an essentially moral argument for White Nationalism. At worst, it distracts us from dealing with the deeper roots of Jewish power and White weakness.
I wish to end with a few words from Jonathan Bowden, who has been a major inspiration for what I have written here. When an exponent of White revival is asked, “Well what’s your view of the Shoah then?” Bowden recommends simply saying: “We’ve stepped over that.” Meaning that we have overcome it, that we are moving forward, that the future calls, and we are a people who wish to have a future again. We recognize that the Holocaust is being used to abort that future.
To the retort, “What do you mean you’ve ‘stepped over’ that? Are you minimizing its importance to humanity?” Bowden counsels the reply, “We are minimizing its importance to our form of humanity!”
I wish I could have asked Bowden what he means by “our form of humanity” prior to his untimely death. Obviously he is referring to White people. But, whether he knew it or not, I think he is referring to only a subset of Whites.
Today Whites, as a whole, are a race without a future. White Nationalists wish to save our people, but the sad truth is that we can’t save all of them. We are too few, the rot is too deep, and the hour is too late.
Thus, ultimately, we are not so much saving our people as becoming a new people. Hence “our form of humanity” consists specifically of Whites who have, through a Nietzschean revolution in values, overcome Jewish power and White weakness at their roots, thus becoming Whites who, once again, have a future.
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