THE
PATTERN OF REPRESSION
The
combination of demonization and police state methods is pretty
constant down through the years: opponents of the Kosovo war
were labeled apologists for "mass murder" and shills for the
repulsive regime of Slobodan Milosevic (some day I'll do a
column devoted solely to the subject of my hate mail); when
Patrick J. Buchanan opposed the Gulf War and correctly observed
that it served the national interest of the state of Israel
and not the US, he
was viciously attacked as an "anti-Semite" in a demonization
campaign that has not ended to this day. During the Vietnam
war, opponents of US intervention were not only routinely
painted with the "Communist" brush, but the FBI and other
government agencies conducted a
campaign of covert disruption in which they infiltrated
and sought to derail the antiwar movement. Of course, Americans
have never been too kind to antiwar dissidents: when US troops
are in the field, all Americans are expected to rally 'round
the flag, boys, in spite of any misgivings. From the
war of 1812, onward, antiwar dissidents were routinely
rounded up, jailed, lynched, tarred and feathered. In World
War I, roaming mobs terrorized and often killed German-Americans,
while the antiwar press was closed down by the "liberal" Woodrow
Wilson. A semi-official
US government propaganda effort was put into place, but
it wasn't really until World War II that the demonization
techniques that are so much a part of modern warfare really
came into their own. In the US, these techniques were lifted
wholesale from the repertoire of the rising totalitarian powers,
borrowed from Stalin, Hitler, and the Italian fascists, and
put to good use during the "good war."
WORLD
WAR II AND THE HIGH ART OF DEMONIZATION
The
infamous Moscow
Trials of the 1930s, staged by Stalin
to cement his hold on absolute power, were the model for the
effort undertaken by the US government during the war years
to not only discredit its opponents but also to jail them,
if at all possible. The massive roundup of Japanese,
German,
and Italian-Americans
was a corollary to the relentless propaganda campaign that
singled them out as a "fifth column" coiled and ready to strike.
This massive smear campaign was also directed at the large
and combative antiwar movement of the time, the America
First Committee, as well as its leading spokesmen: Charles
A. Lindbergh, John
T. Flynn, and "isolationists" in every walk of life were
singled out by the War Party and viciously attacked
and this was true especially in the arts, from the actress
Lillian
Gish to the poet Robinson
Jeffers, and in publishing, where the editorial staffs
of the major American newspapers and magazines were purged
of virtually all "isolationists." When war finally came, the
War Party took its terrible revenge on all who had held out
the hope of peace and none suffered more than Lawrence
Dennis, who has yet to finally receive the honor that is his
due.
THE
OUTSIDER
Lawrence
Dennis was an outsider in a movement of outsiders, a unique
and largely solitary figure whose career as a writer and notorious
"seditionist" embodies the tragedy and bravery of the Old
Right, the pre-World War II "America First" generation of
conservative intellectuals and activists. In many important
ways, Dennis is the prototype of modern "paleo-conservatives."
His career as a controversialist and the leading American
nationalist intellectual of his time charts the rise and fall
of the Old Right and, perhaps, holds a lesson for us
today. Born in Atlanta in 1893, Dennis had what historian
Justus
Doenecke describes as "a varied career," which included
a stint as a "boy evangelist." A recent article on Dennis
in The Baffler
in which the author, transcending his own leftist politics,
seems to appreciate if not fully understand his subject
informs us that he was born Lonnie Lawrence Dennis, adopted
by a mulatto couple, and was undoubtedly of mixed race: his
mother was black, but his father was in all probability white.
To say that young Lonnie was a precocious kid is a definite
understatement: by the age of five he was preaching before
large audiences in Atlanta, and was soon bringing the Word
to congregations around the country as "The Mulatto Boy Evangelist,"
and taking his road show as far as England. He published his
autobiography at the ripe old age of ten.
BOY
WONDER
In
1901, after the death of his father, the eight-year-old Dennis
traveled to Europe with his mother, where he became conversant
in French and German. After four years, he returned to America,
a young cosmopolitan. His mother envisioned him in the pulpit,
but Dennis was meant for other things. He applied to Exeter,
an incubator of the elite, and was accepted. "Before that,"
he recalled, "I had never been to college; I had never been
to school." He had no formal schooling, "although I had plenty
of education." Young Dennis entered Harvard in 1915. When
Eastern bankers and an Anglophile fifth column succeeded in
dragging us into the European war, he joined the Army and
was sent to Brest, France, where he was put in charge of a
company of military police. He returned to Harvard and earned
his degree in 1920: two years of prep school, a little over
two years of college, and he stepped readily into the elite
circles he had somehow penetrated as a member of the U.S.
diplomatic corps.
THE
MAN BEHIND THE MASK
That
Dennis did not really belong in those circles and had
only managed to infiltrate them by remaking himself and "passing,"
so to speak is only hinted at in the remarkably oblique
interview he gave, in 1967, to William Keylor for the Columbia
University Oral History Collection. While the leftist Keylor
attempted to indict him for sedition all over again, asking
about William
Dudley Pelley, Father
Coughlin, and the German-American
Bund, the subtext of Dennis's recollection of his life
is that of an outsider "passing" for an insider and
doing a remarkably good job of it. His answers, when asked
about his early life, and especially his relationship with
his parents, are revealing for what they do not say.
Dennis never names his parents and never even claims that
they were married. When Keylor asks him about his mother's
influence on his politics, Dennis not only denies any influence
but declares: "I never had much association with her after
I passed fourteen or even thirteen." She lived in Washington,
D.C., and sent him "about $100 a month." How Dennis had the
money to attend Exeter and Harvard, without any formal education
or family connections, is a mystery.
PLAYING
BOTH SIDES OF THE STREET
When
the State Department sent Dennis to Haiti, where the US army
of occupation was enforcing stability at gunpoint, he was
really in his element. As the assistant to the minister, an
old "New Orleans aristocrat," he had "the run of the town."
This meant that, while he belonged to the American Club, where
he socialized with other diplomats and military personnel,
he also was a fixture at the Haitian Club, or Cercle Belle
Vue, owned by a German who had married a Haitian
"an octoroon, of course" and the whole thing was "a
very broadening experience," said Dennis. "I was on both sides
of the fence." This theme of duality, of cultural ambidexterity,
continued after he was assigned to the American legation to
Romania: "There again I played both sides of the street. I
went to Romanian parties and I also went to Jewish parties.
The Romanians were very anti-Jewish and wouldn't take a Jew
into any of their clubs. But I went to the best Jewish club
there," he said. "I played both sides of the street and I
got along very happily."
A
CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM
In
1927, Dennis resigned from the diplomatic service in protest
against US
intervention in Nicaragua, and became an economic consultant
to various investment banking firms with Latin American interests.
He had served as the American troubleshooter in Nicaragua,
and the experience made him a confirmed opponent of foreign
loans south of the border and of a foreign policy in which
American gunships were dispatched by New York banks to make
good on their bad investments. He burst on the national scene
in 1930, in a series of articles for the New Republic
in which he exposed the foreign-bond racket and predicted
that the bubble was about to burst. Dennis's first book, Is
Capitalism Doomed? (1932), established him as a much more
acerbic and perceptive critic of capitalism than any of the
leftist ideologues who threw their lot in with Marxism.
THE
NATIONALIST ALTERNATIVE
Unlike
the Marxists, Dennis protested that his critique of capitalism
was "not destructive." In the midst of the Great
Depression, he sought to "prolong and render more pleasant
the old age of capitalism." The system was caught in a dilemma:
With no new worlds to conquer, and no new markets, there was
no way for the profit motive to lead us out of the crisis.
"In its old age, a senile capitalism must be nurtured by the
state, not with war profits, necessarily, but on an even diet
of 2 percent gruel." Powerless to create markets for itself,
decrepit capitalism must depend on the state to keep the masses
from idleness. It is either that or war: "Keeping six to eight
million men unemployed," he warned, "is the best known way
to prepare for war. The day a war starts somewhere in the
world, millions of unemployed . . . will heave a grateful
sigh of relief. As American business picks up, American idealism
will get acquainted with the moral issue of the New Armageddon
and history will repeat itself." Ten years before James Burnham's
influential and overpraised The
Managerial Revolution, Dennis argued that capitalism
was doomed and that something that was neither socialism nor
capitalism would take its place. He saw himself as an observer,
an objective commentator on trends that had their own internal
dynamic. Technological and social changes had revolutionized
the old order, and laissez faire was no longer viable. But
the Soviet Union was not necessarily the wave of the future;
as an alternative to Marxism, Dennis held out the prospect
of a distinctively American nationalism. His program for ameliorating
the crisis of market senility included protective tariffs,
anti-monopoly legislation, restrictions on credit, and a return
to small-scale production for a domestic market.
SAVE
YOUR CANDLES THE DARK AGES ARE COMING
Unlike
Burnham and other prophets of modernity, Dennis did not exult
in the triumph of the new order; his elegy for the Old Republic
was touched with nostalgia for a lost world. "The point of
view of this book," he wrote, "is not unlike that which a
citizen of Rome might have taken a century or so before the
fall of the empire. He would not have regretted the doom of
prevailing leaders, but he would have been saddened by the
contemplation of the loss of many of the values of Roman civilization."
For Dennis, "the opening of an era of economic dictatorships
will be tantamount to the revival of the Dark Ages."
BETWEEN
SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Dennis
developed this theme in The Coming American Fascism
(1936), a title that did not describe the author's ideology
so much as his predicament. If the choice was between an American
corporate state and an American Soviet, Dennis chose the former
as more humane: This was preferable, he argued, to the liquidation
of America's kulaks. Owing allegiance to no party or "ism,"
Dennis saw himself as an objective "student, observer and
interpreter of current trends" who steered a middle course
between the Scylla of Marxist socialism and the Charybdis
of economic chaos. The only alternative to war, he argued,
was a political and spiritual renewal of the ruling elite
at the helm of a centralized state. The revolution against
finance capital was already here, and the only choice was
whether it would be Marxist or native American. In opting
for the latter, Dennis called his system "fascism," but this
was confusing to his readers and, later, injurious to his
own career and reputation. He never advocated a one-party
state, but saw political repression as uniquely European and
unlikely to take root in America.
THE
DYNAMICS OF WAR AND REVOLUTION
Dennis
developed his thesis still further in The
Dynamics of War and Revolution (1940): Roosevelt's
drive to war was fueled by the need to get the nation out
of the Great Depression. With the frontier gone, the crisis
of capitalism could only be resolved in a new corporatism
at home or war abroad. The irony, he pointed out, was that
the United States would "go fascist fighting Fascism." Roosevelt's
wartime dictatorship would "solve" the problem of unemployment
by paving the way for national socialism, American-style.
But Dennis argued that there was a less bloody, less brutal
way to accomplish the same ends and still preserve
the values unique to the American character. While differing
with Dennis's domestic prescription, the conservative writer
Freda Utley expressed
the hope that his views would be evaluated objectively, in
the same spirit in which they were given. It was a vain hope:
the left reacted with fear, anger and eventually the
mailed fist of the state.
BROWN-BAITED
BY THE REDS
The
insufferable Max
Lerner, the arbiter of fellow-traveling liberalism and
the loudest drumbeater for war, attacked Dennis as a "barbarian"
and decreed that no self-respecting liberal could have truck
with him. Dennis's dictum that fascism was just another variant
of socialism hit Lerner and his kin too close to home. The
Communist Party newspaper, the Daily World temporarily
antiwar because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact billed Dennis
as "the Leader of Fascism in America" and an "American Hitler."
It did not matter that there was no trace of racism or anti-Semitism
in Dennis's works: William Z. Foster, the mini-Stalin of the
American Communist Party, averred that Dennis had to "soft-pedal
anti-Semitism and anti-Negroism, which are organic to his
fascist thesis," so as "not to arouse the antagonism of the
workers by talking plainly on this matter."
THE
BLACKEST IRONY
For
Dennis to be anointed leader of a racist fifth column in America
was just another irony in a life rich with them. For a supposed
fellow-traveler of Hitler, Dennis hardly fit the Aryan mold.
Charles A. Lindbergh, for whom Dennis is said to have written
a few speeches, described him as having a "rugged," dark-complexioned
look that made him seem as if he would be more "at home at
a frontier trading post." Dennis's archenemy, the notorious
agent provocateur John
Roy Carlson, noted that "Dennis' hair is woolly, dark
and kinky. The texture of his skin is unusually dark and the
eyes of Hitler's intellectual keynoter of 'Aryanism' are a
rich deep brown, his lips fleshy." This is the measure of
what Lawrence had to endure: the man Life magazine
called, in a picture caption, "America's No. 1 intellectual
Fascist . . . brain-truster for the forces of appeasement"
and Hitler's alleged pawn was almost certainly an African-American.
CRIMINALIZING
THE ANTI-WAR OPPOSITION
The
revelation of Dennis's ethnicity is unlikely to rehabilitate
him in liberal quarters quite the contrary. Liberals
were deaf then to his argument that Anglo-American policy
"assume[d] that certain races like the Germans and Japanese
can be treated as we treat the negroes or the British treat
the darker races under their rule," and they are unlikely
to be convinced at this late date. The notion that "Germans
can no more enjoy equality of opportunity in a liberal, capitalistic
Anglo-Saxon world order than Negroes can enjoy equality in
white America" so enraged liberals that they determined to
shut him up for good. John Roy Carlson's book Under Cover,
published in 1943, was a key element of a campaign to criminalize
opposition to the President's war plans. Working as an "undercover
agent" in the America First movement while on the payroll
of such warmongering groups as the "Friends of Democracy,"
Carlson posed as the publisher of an anti-Semitic rag, the
Christian Defender, and spread race hate in the name
of "exposing" it. Quoting a fanciful conversation with Dennis
verbatim, Carlson depicted him as the intellectual Svengali
of the Nazi fifth column, the link between America First and
the pro-Nazi fringe; his book was essentially a dramatization
of the charges filed by the Justice Department against Dennis
and 27 other defendants in the mass Sedition
Trial of 1944.
ROOSEVELT
ENRAGED
The
trial had its genesis in early 1941. At the close of a Cabinet
meeting, FDR took Attorney General Francis
Biddle aside. After the others had left, the President
took out a packet and laid on the table a number of pamphlets,
newspapers, and leaflets. It was a miscellaneous assortment
of literature denouncing the President as a warmonger and
calling for his impeachment.
The
President leaned forward in his chair and asked, "What are
you going to do about this?"
"Mr.
President," replied Biddle, "nothing can be done."
The
attorney general, who came from a distinguished Virginia family
his mother's ancestors included John Randolph of Roanoke
and Edmund Randolph, the first attorney general of the United
States may have been under the illusion that he was still
living in a free country. The President quickly disabused
him of that quaint notion, shouting across the table: "I want
something done about these cases and you go ahead and do
it!"
THE
INDICTMENTS
For
months on end, the President bullied Biddle in Cabinet meetings,
demanding to know, "when are you going to indict the seditionists?"
The attorney general patiently explained that it was necessary
to build a case. As Biddle put it in his memoirs, FDR "was
not much interested in the theory of sedition, or in the constitutional
right to criticize the government in wartime. He wanted this
antiwar talk stopped." William Power Maloney, a left-wing
New York lawyer and ardent New Dealer, was put in charge of
the investigation. By the summer of 1941, Maloney began to
round up the "suspects" and call witnesses, including Carlson
and scores of isolationist and "far-right" activists, from
the prominent to the obscure. In the summer of 1942, the President
finally stopped badgering the befuddled Biddle: the first
indictment was handed down, naming 28 individuals. A second
indictment, handed down in January of the following year,
expanded the scope of the case, naming five more individuals,
30 publications, and 26 organizations, including the America
First Committee, the National Committee to Keep America Out
of Foreign Wars, the Constitutional Educational League Bulletin,
and Scribner's Commentator.
KANGAROO
COURT
A
cooperative judge, E.C. Eichner, a former Democratic congressman
and 100-percent New Dealer, was lined up. There was only one
problem: The government had no case, and Biddle knew it. Sen.
Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT), who had stood up to pro-war mobs
as a county attorney during World War I, stormed into Biddle's
office and threatened a congressional investigation of the
department's misconduct. Biddle reined in Maloney, replaced
him with another prosecutor (over the President's protests),
and dropped the America First Committee and the more mainstream
conservative groups from the indictment. However, he added
eight more individuals and scores of publications
including Lawrence Dennis, The
Dynamics of War and Revolution, and Dennis's Weekly
Foreign Letter, his modest little periodical which had
continued to blast away at FDR's war mania after Pearl Harbor.
"DESTROY
ISOLATIONISM FOREVER"
The
defendants in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 were a diverse
lot who had only one belief in common: their opposition to
the idea that it was the moral duty of the United States to
go to war with Germany in order to save the British and Soviet
empires. Some, like Elizabeth Dilling, author of The Red
Network; and William
Dudley Pelley, organizer of the Silver Shirts, were anti-Semitic
agitators; others, such as Dennis, were isolationists or nationalists.
Some were simply
crackpots who represented a threat to no one but themselves.
A "conspiracy" hatched by defendants with only the most tenuous
affiliation had to be a conspiracy of ideas: As Dennis and
Maximilian St. George, one of the defense lawyers in the case,
put it in their book, A Trial on Trial (1945), the
case marked "a trend toward application here in America of
the theories and practices of the totalitarian states, in
which people are tried, convicted and often sentenced to death
for having been on the losing side in a political fight."
The key to understanding the meaning of the trial, and the
motives of its sponsors, was a full-page advertisement placed
by Freedom House in the New York Times and the Herald
Tribune on January 30, 1943, declaring: "First, we must
win the war. Second, we must destroy isolationism forever."
PRISONERS
OF DELUSION
From
the beginning, Dennis insisted that the government had no
case. As the trial dragged on, the mountain of "evidence"
amassed by prosecutor O.J. Rogge amounted to nothing more
than the various public statements of the defendants
leaflets, articles, books, and speeches. The jury, the defense
lawyers, and the defendants, all wilting under this daily
bombardment, developed a sense of camaraderie and began to
think of themselves as fellow prisoners of the prosecutor's
elaborate delusions. In the lunchroom, the jurors, freely
mingling with the defendants, were often heard to complain
that they still had no idea what the case was all about.
THE
MEANING OF SEDITION
Dennis
set the tone for the defense in his two-hour opening statement,
pointing out that the evidence the defendants' opposition
to the war did not fit the charge, which was that their
actions were designed to "counsel, urge and cause insubordination,
disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty by members of the military
and naval forces of the United States." None of the defendants
had ever been in touch with members of the Armed Forces, and
no attempt was made to show otherwise. The prosecution claimed
in the indictment that the defendants had "disseminated .
. . oral, written, and printed statements . . . asserting
among other things that in substance: democracy is decadent,"
and that "the acts, proclamations, and orders of the public
officials of the United States and the laws of Congress are
illegal, corrupt, traitorous and in direct violation of the
Constitution of the United States." Among their crimes was
the view that "President Roosevelt is reprehensible, a warmonger,
liar, unscrupulous," and entirely the servant of "Communists
and Plutocrats." In short, the defendants had dared to tell
the truth about FDR, who was now the virtual dictator of the
country, and for that they would pay a high price.
THE
SMEAR BUND
The
price would be higher for some. The elderly Elmer J. Garner
editor of Publicity, one of the proscribed publications
met his maker just as the trial got under way; he died
with 40 cents in his pocket. Others, such as Dennis, had even
more to lose. Before the Sedition Trial of 1944, he had always
found a platform for his views; after it was over, he was
relegated to the margins and virtually forgotten, except to
be dredged up by his old enemies every once in a while as
an example of unreconstructed evil. The court historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., depicted Dennis as having "Goebbels-like
qualities" because he was "clever, glib and trenchant"
but "Goebbels-like" more truly describes the quality and character
of the propaganda campaign unleashed against Dennis and the
other defendants. Rogge smeared Dennis as "the Alfred
Rosenberg of the Nazi Fifth Column in the U.S.," although
the only evidence presented against him was the fact that
his books and articles had been quoted a grand total of seven
times in the publications of the German-American Bund.
THE
DEFENSE GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE
With
the whole weight of public opinion, the media, and the system
of legalized repression bearing down on his shoulders, Dennis
went on the offensive. Against a charge of conspiracy, most
lawyers would deny that their client was part of any such
conspiracy. But from his opening statement, Dennis challenged
the central premise of the prosecution: Such a conspiracy,
he asserted, had never existed. The Nazi party, unlike the
Soviet, was not an international movement; there was a Comintern,
but no Nazintern, for the simple reason that German national
socialism was a strictly nationalist ideology, without any
real appeal outside of a Greater Germany. There never was
a Nazi fifth column of any significance in the United States
although there was, as recent work by historians such
as Thomas
E. Mahl has revealed, a substantial and influential British
fifth column in this country run directly by British intelligence.
TURNING
THE TABLES
Most
of the defendants, too poor to hire legal counsel, had been
assigned separate lawyers by the court. These draftees were
naturally resentful that they had been conscripted to represent
clients who could not pay, and after the trial had dragged
on for weeks, without the government presenting even a scintilla
of real evidence, this resentment began to boil over. Inspired
and organized by the combative Dennis, the defense rallied
and turned the tables. They objected to the introduction
of every single piece of irrelevant evidence all of
them, singly and in unison. They filed motions to impeach
the judge, and several were admonished from the bench: Two
were thrown out of court. The paper tiger Rogge and his political
police crumbled under their combined assault. Judge Eichner
pounded his gavel almost continuously, as if to drown out
the rising chorus of protests not only from the defense
lawyers but from the media, which demanded to know why he
had permitted the defendants to turn his courtroom into a
circus. As historian Wayne
S. Cole put it, the defense "exhausted his energies, his
skills, and his health."
A
FITTING END
On
November 30, 1944, Judge Eichner spent all day fuming because
the defendants were defiantly addressing envelopes stuffed
with copies of a speech by Sen. William Langer (R-ND) demanding
their release, and he contemplated citing them all-including
Langer-for contempt of court. He decided to sleep on it-and
never woke up. With the death of Eichner, a mistrial was declared:
Much to the dismay of the Daily Worker and Dorothy
Thompson, the case was never retried.
AN
APPEAL TO REASON
Dennis
returned to a semblance of the life he had known. His Weekly
Foreign Letter was revived under a new title, the Appeal
to Reason, which was published until very near the end
of his long life. (He died in 1977.) But the trial had devastated
him financially and spiritually. Many intellectuals, writers,
and activists suffered greatly as a result of the anti-isolationist
purge of the professions, including John T. Flynn, Garet
Garrett, Albert
Jay Nock, H.
L. Mencken, Frank
Chodorov, publicist Joe
Kamp, and actress Lillian Gish. But none suffered as much
as Dennis, who was left virtually penniless by the ordeal
and only survived due to the support of those few who admired
his work. The Appeal to Reason, with fewer than 900
subscribers, nonetheless reached an influential circle of
conservative activists and politicians, the hard core of the
dwindling Old Right.
THE
LAST ISOLATIONIST
In
the Appeal and in his 1967 book, Operational Thinking
for Survival, Dennis surveyed the political landscape
with the same penetrating vision that had informed his earlier
writing. As the most consistent and uncompromising of all
the old isolationists, he opposed every step in the escalation
of the Cold War. In 1946, he wrote that the elites required
"a war unity against foreign devils. Yesterday it was Hitler;
soon it will be Stalin." He was right. Having been the victim
of a political frame-up, he disdained McCarthy and the "anti-red
squealers" and "neurotic, nutty apostates" who were leading
the new crusade. By the sheer logic of his utterly uncompromising
"isolationism" and his view of war as the great collectivizer,
Dennis reverted to an earlier belief in laissez faire. Militarism
was at the core of the new American socialism: The military
was "the most socialist institution of the State in America
today," he wrote at the height of the Cold War. The liberal
internationalists who were calling for a holy war against
Soviet Russia would turn this country into a "socialist society
by conscription, controls and rationing." At the end of his
life, the "Alfred Rosenberg of America's Fifth Column" was
preaching peace and denouncing the growth of a "police garrison
state."
RECLAIMING
THE PAST
Dennis
died in August 1977, having lived to see the rise of the American
national security state and the verification of his essential
thesis that the engines of war keep the wheels of the
state capitalist order turning and keep our elites
in profits and in power. He deserves far better than the smears
of the court historians. Once rescued from the likes of John
Roy Carlson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his legacy will enrich
a conservative movement that is just beginning to rediscover
its Old Right Heritage and his example will inspire
a new generation of the antiwar movement that sees itself
as neither Left nor Right but plain and simply American.
A
somewhat different version of this article appeared in the
April 2000 issue of Chronicles
magazine.
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