SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
October 2003
Volume 10, Number 10
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Gaining Respect
-> Peacetime Notes (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> Jefferson's Disciple
-> From Federation to Monolith
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
Gaining Respect
(page 1)
{{ Material dropped or changed solely for reasons of
space appears in double curly brackets. }}
A dear and wise friend asks why I persist in
associating myself with what are called "right-wing
fringe groups" (though he doesn't use this phrase
himself). He believes that by doing so I've hurt my
reputation and my career. He stresses that he would never
suggest that I compromise the truth as I understand it,
but he wishes I'd choose my company more carefully.
He may well be right. He is a man of deep
conviction, who has managed to thrive without the
slightest sacrifice of integrity, and I should probably
try to follow his admirable example. But I can't.
Over the past few years I've addressed many
"right-wing fringe groups," of which the most
controversial -- no, the most notorious; you're only
"controversial" if you have respectable supporters as
well as detractors -- are undoubtedly the Institute for
Historical Review and David Irving's Real History
conferences. I've also spoken to Catholic groups,
pro-life groups, libertarian groups, conservative college
groups, anti-war groups, neo-Confederate groups, the
Council of Conservative Citizens, {{ Shakespeare
authorship dissenters, and various other gatherings, }}
few if any of which could be called liberal. {{ In
February I'm scheduled to speak at the annual American
Renaissance convention. }} (Once upon a time I spoke to
neoconservative audiences too, and I'd do so again, but
for some reason those invitations have pretty much ceased
to come.)
Liberalism and its cousin, neoconservatism, rely on
conservatives who crave respectability to divide the
right wing for them. It works like a charm. Once a man
(or a group) has been tainted as "extremist," "racist,"
"Nazi," "anti-Semitic," "Holocaust-denying," or just
vaguely "bigoted," the Respectable Conservatives will
finish the job. They will faithfully observe and enforce
boycott and blacklist, until the right wing has been
purged of real enemies of liberalism.
The target doesn't have to be a real bigot, of
course. But it doesn't matter. Once he's defined as an
a priori bigot, nothing he says counts in his favor. In
fact he probably won't even be quoted. If he fails to
emit flagrantly bigoted words, that just proves that he's
a "smooth," "cunning," "urbane" bigot who knows how to
conceal his ascribed true nature. ("He can't fool us!")
The archtype of the Respectable Conservative is Bill
Buckley, who had to work very hard to earn his
respectability. After being tarred as a Nazi and
crypto-Nazi for many years, he learned to play by the
liberal-neocon rules, excommunicating and repudiating not
only actual bigots, but libertarians, Objectivists,
Birchers, Old Rightists, and other proscribed
"extremists."
Eventually he {{ managed to scrape off the swastika
that had been painted on him. He }} had done enough real
damage to the right wing to merit liberal-neocon
acceptance, which he gratefully accepted. {{ As a result,
he hasn't said anything interesting in decades. I
observed the process up close. As a young man, I'd
worshipped him. I was outraged when he was smeared by
liberals (some of whom later became neocons). But after
working for him for ten years I confided sadly to a
fellow journalist: "I used to want to be like Bill. Now I
dread ending up like him." }}
Maybe my friend is right. Maybe I've been
excessively defiant. But today the conservative movement
is dead, while pretending to have won a war in which it
surrendered long ago. Conservatives may not know it, but
they are all effectively liberals now. And at least I
have the satisfaction of being able to say "they," not
"we." Sometimes you have to choose between respectability
and self-respect.
Peacetime Notes
(page 2)
{{ Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks
around the emphasized words.}}
Did anyone foresee that occupying Iraq might be a
little harder than defeating it in war? Not the Bush
administration, it seems. A real resistance has erupted.
"Bring 'em on," said President Bush. The Iraqis were glad
to oblige. American and British troops are being killed
by snipers; the UN's Baghdad headquarters has been bombed
and its chief diplomat killed; a major mosque has also
been bombed, and a leading "moderate" ayatollah also
killed. The Bush gang calls the resistance (what else?)
"terrorism." But only occupation forces, their adjuncts,
and collaborators have been targeted. Some might call it
"patriotism."
* * *
Writing in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, brainy Paul
Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of whatever and mastermind of
the war and occupation, manages to use the word
"terrorism" and its variants 15 times. Not to mention
"the free world," "extremists," "resolve," and all that.
It's a piece of crude agitprop that might shame a North
Korean commie hack. It's also a sign of the Bush crowd's
desperation. Contrary to all official assurances, the
U.S. troops aren't coming home soon, and the seized Iraqi
oil assets aren't paying for the operation.
* * *
Saddam Hussein is apparently still alive, cheering
on the resistance from his secret lair. A big help he is.
Why doesn't he provide the "terrorists" with those
"weapons of mass destruction" we know he has?
* * *
Is the torch passing to a new generation? The buzz
has it that David Brooks of the neocon WEEKLY STANDARD
will soon replace William Safire as the "conservative"
columnist of the NEW YORK TIMES. And neocon David Frum is
rumored to be in line to succeed Richard Lowry as editor
of the formerly conservative NATIONAL REVIEW. Can't say
I'm surprised. I may soon hold the distinction of editing
the last remaining non-Zionist publication in the United
States.
* * *
Twentieth Century Fox, which usually distributes Mel
Gibson's films, won't be handling his next one. That
would be THE PASSION, Gibson's own reconstruction of the
hours leading up to the Crucifixion. Rupert Murdoch, who
owns Fox, "doesn't need the aggravation," according to an
executive of another studio. The Forces of Tolerance
dislike Gibson's old-fashioned Catholicism and charge
that the film will incite anti-Semitic violence. Fat
chance. More likely they're afraid it will incite
conversions to Christianity.
* * *
To the consternation of liberals everywhere, the
U.S. Constitution made a rare appearance when Alabama's
Chief Justice Roy Moore defied a Federal court's order to
remove the Ten Commandments from a state building. He was
duly suspended from office, but not before he'd reminded
millions what the Constitution actually means. Thomas
Jefferson would have applauded.
* * *
Let's not lose our perspective when Federal
spending, deficits, and the total debt are reckoned in
trillions of dollars. Trillions may sound like a lot, but
at least we aren't talking about *real* dollars.
Jefferson's Disciple
(pages 3-6)
{{ Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks
around the emphasized words.}}
The War between the States was both a military
contest and a struggle over the American constitutional
tradition. The Northern states were led by a president
who claimed philosophical descent from Thomas Jefferson,
and especially the Declaration of Independence. But the
South claimed Jefferson's legacy too.
In an 1859 letter Abraham Lincoln wrote, "The
principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of
free society." He went on: "All honor to Jefferson -- to
the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for
national independence by a single people, had the
coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a
merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth,
applicable to all men and all times." In a Philadelphia
speech in 1861, a few days before his inauguration as
president, he said, "I have never had a feeling
politically that did not spring from the sentiments
embodied in the Declaration of Independence." And in his
most famous speech of all, the Gettysburg Address,
Lincoln invoked the Declaration's "proposition that all
men are created equal." He felt he needed the full
authority of Jefferson and his "proposition" to justify
making war on the seceding states.
When Lincoln appealed to the Declaration, it was
always to echo that proposition. Since then countless
others have followed his example, citing "equality" as
the great central principle of American politics. For
many, equality is something not merely to be recognized,
but something yet to be *achieved.* The government must
not only treat men -- all men, and women too -- as
equals; it must *make* them equal. Anything less, we are
told, would be a "betrayal" of the "promise" of America.
The most ambitious liberals go far beyond Lincoln.
They want the government to make people equal in every
respect, by constant intervention in educational and
economic life, abolishing traditional limits on the
authority and power of the state. There is no end to the
grand project of equalizing. At times it requires the
state to commit the very racial discriminations liberals
used to oppose, as long as those discriminations are made
on behalf of the putatively "disadvantaged." In a
practical sense, nobody knows what equality will mean
next.
What did it mean to Lincoln? Chiefly, it meant only
one thing: that slavery was wrong. The Federal Government
had no constitutional power to touch slavery within the
states where it already existed, but it must regard it as
an evil and prevent its spread into new territories. At
the same time, it did *not* mean that the Negro must be
the political and social equal of the white man, even in
the free states. He supported the harsh black code of his
own state, Illinois, denying Negro citizenship. He
emphatically favored, and worked for, the "colonization"
of free Negroes outside the United States. Even as
president, he sought a constitutional amendment to
authorize Federal spending to colonize "free colored
persons" abroad.
Oddly enough, this is one point on which Jefferson
and Lincoln agreed. Jefferson believed that slavery was
wrong in principle and hoped for its peaceful abolition,
to be accompanied by "deportation" of the freed Negroes
to Africa. He joined Henry Clay's American Colonization
Society toward that end; five other former and future
presidents, including Lincoln, also joined, along with
two chief justices of the United States, several U.S.
senators, and other prominent Americans. It seemed the
only hope of getting rid of slavery without creating a
permanent racial problem.
Otherwise, Lincoln had little in common with
Jefferson. Lincoln ignored -- if he was even aware of --
the nuances of Jefferson's political thought. Lincoln had
a limited education; Jefferson had an extremely
cultivated mind and read Greek, Latin, and French as well
as English literature, including the sciences. He had
participated in the great debates at the American
founding and had a deep knowledge of all the issues at
stake.
"Four score and seven years ago," as Lincoln
understood history, "our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal." This famous sentence drastically abridges and
distorts what actually happened, and Jefferson would have
repudiated it.
First, of course, the Declaration said nothing about
a monolithic "new nation." It declared that the 13
colonies were now "Free and Independent States," each
having "full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract
Alliances, establish Commerce, and do all other Acts and
Things which Independent States may of right do." Lincoln
reduced this to a claim of "national independence by a
single people."
The Declaration appealed to the republican principle
that "all men are created equal," but only as a
justification for asserting the states' independence from
the hereditary British monarchy. It didn't "dedicate" the
states (much less "a new nation") to that principle.
There was no hint that the principle might ultimately be
applied to slavery; the colonists were quite untroubled
by that possibility, if it occurred to them at all. In
fact, one of the Declaration's grievances, as Jefferson
Davis would later note, was that George III had incited
"domestic insurrections" -- slave revolts -- in the
colonies. These egalitarians meant to keep their
servants!
Yet Lincoln contended, in his first inaugural
address, that an indissoluble Union had been ratified by
the Declaration, and "further matured" in the Articles of
Confederation and the Constitution. Here the plain words
of the Articles contradict him: "Each state *retains* its
sovereignty, freedom, and independence ..." (My
emphasis.) That is, the states were independent not only
of Britain, *but also of each other.* Because they so
clearly affirmed this mutual independence during the
Revolutionary War, the Articles may be seen as a second
Declaration of Independence.
Nobody was more insistent on the constitutional
limits of the Federal Government, and on the prerogatives
reserved to the states, than Jefferson. Time and again he
attacked what he saw as Federal usurpations tending to
"consolidation." In 1791 he opposed the creation of a
national bank because the Constitution gave Congress no
power to do it; in 1798 he anonymously wrote the Kentucky
Resolutions, damning the Alien and Sedition Acts on
similar grounds; during his first term as president he
bitterly opposed John Marshall's claims for judicial
review as another attempt to aggrandize Federal power.
Jefferson was forever on guard against "usurpations" and
"consolidation"; both words are tellingly absent from
Lincoln's vocabulary.
Later Jefferson would condemn Federal "internal
improvements" as lacking constitutional warrant. Such
projects were the basis of Henry Clay's ambitious
"American System," which Lincoln ardently supported. That
Federally funded roads, canals, and (later) railroads
might conduce to general prosperity would have cut no ice
with Jefferson; at stake was the simple principle on
which freedom depended: the Constitution didn't authorize
them, and whatever wasn't authorized was forbidden. The
Tenth Amendment spelled out the principle that the
Federal Government had only the powers "delegated" to it
in the Constitution, but that principle was really
inherent in the very idea of a written constitution.
Jefferson clamped onto this point like a bulldog. He
was always suspicious of arguments for "implied powers"
of the Federal Government, believing that such arguments
could lead anywhere, in time undermining all
constitutional limits.
So Lincoln's version of the American founding and
his claim to be a follower of Jefferson were quite
ahistorical
The Declaration itself is a secessionist document,
and Jefferson himself was a secessionist. He usually used
other terms for secession: "separation," "dissolution,"
or simply "independence." But the issue arose several
more times in his life, and each time it did he
recognized withdrawal from the Union as a legitimate
option of the states, though always one to be taken only
reluctantly, as a last resort.
In 1816 Jefferson told William H. Crawford, "If any
state in the Union will declare that it prefers
separation ... to a continuance in union ... I have no
hesitation in saying, 'Let us separate.'" On another
occasion he confided to Crawford that he wished states
favoring "unlimited commerce and war" would "withdraw"
from the Union.
Jefferson counseled caution and deliberation before
taking the step of secession, but he certainly held that
secession was legitimate. Thus in 1825 he wrote to
William Branch Giles that we should "separate from our
companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the
dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a
government without limitation of powers. [But] *between
these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be
no hesitation."* (My emphasis.)
In one of his last public papers, Jefferson wrote
that it was better for the states to accede to internal
improvements, unconstitutional though they were, than to
withdraw from the Union over them. But the form of his
argument leaves no doubt of his conviction that leaving
the Union is always ultimately within the rights of the
people of the states. Though he cherished the Union,
unlike Lincoln he didn't idolize it.
Jefferson never saw the American people as a single
undifferentiated mass or "nation." They were primarily
*the people of the states,* in voluntary confederation
through the U.S. Constitution. The relation of the people
of Virginia to, say, the people of New York was a warm
but finally contingent relation; it was real, good, and
important, but it might, for whatever the people of any
state deemed sufficient reason, be dissolved. The
American people existed chiefly in their states. Their
political confederation, their Federal Union, was
secondary.
The Constitution, their contract, laid out the terms
of confederation. If those terms were violated, the whole
contract might be nullified. This should never be done
rashly; as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, "Prudence,
indeed, will dictate that Governments long established
should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and
accordingly all Experience hath shewn that Mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than
to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they
are accustomed."
Yet even under the Constitution, Jefferson believed,
the states remained "Free and Independent States." They
had delegated a few of their powers to the Federal
Government, retaining all the rest; and if the Federal
Government persistently usurped powers properly belonging
to the states, the injured states might properly consider
such breaches of the Constitution as dissolving their
union with the other states, and declare their
independence again.
This is a far cry from Lincoln's view of the Union
as indissoluble and "perpetual," which would mean that no
matter how grossly the Federal Government might
transgress its constitutional limits, no state could
claim a constitutional right to leave the Union. For
Lincoln the Union was forever sovereign over the states,
*with or without the Constitution.*
Jefferson would have regarded this as a monstrous
doctrine, repugnant to the very idea of constitutional
government. And of course it isn't to be found in the
Constitution itself. The Constitution says nothing about
secession, one way or the other. It doesn't say that
states may secede; nor does it say they can't, nor does
it give the Federal Government any power to prevent
secession. Jefferson would presumably say that the
principle of constitutional government *presupposes* the
right to secede; therefore there is no reason for the
Constitution to spell it out. By breaching the
Constitution, the Federal Government itself dissolves the
Union as the Constitution defines it.
Not that actual breaches of the Constitution would
be required. Being sovereign, a state might leave the
Union for any reason, or for no reason. But the decision
to take so grave a step needs at least a moral, if not a
legal, justification. In Jefferson's words, "a decent
Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they
[the separationists] should declare the causes which
impel them to the Separation."
In 1848, the young Congressman Abraham Lincoln had a
truly Jeffersonian moment. "Any people anywhere," he
said, "being inclined and having the power, have the
*right* to rise up, and shake off the existing
government, and form a new one that suits them better.
This is a most valuable -- a most sacred right -- a
right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the
world." He added that even "any portion" of a population
might revolutionize within whatever territory they could
control. The "sacred" right extended to secession from an
"existing government."
By 1860 he had abandoned this view of the "most
sacred right," an emphatic echo of Jefferson's
declaration. He never fully explained why. That has been
left to his worshipful exegetes, who try to impute
thorough consistency to all his utterances.
As secession occurred and war between the states
approached, the wisest Southern leaders, among them Davis
and Senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia (who would
become Davis's vice president) warned that though the
Southern states had every right to quit the Union, it
would be imprudent to do so just then. The rich,
populous, and mighty North would surely win any war with
the South. And with Southern Democrats out of Congress,
Republicans would enjoy a monopoly of political power in
the Union.
The Cassandras were exactly right on both counts.
The North had huge material advantages in wealth and
population, and Lincoln, with his compliant Republican
Congress, was quite uninhibited by the Constitution he
said he was trying to "save."
Lincoln willfully confused saving the Union -- by
force, if necessary -- with upholding the Constitution.
His oath of office required him to do the latter. It did
not require him, or even authorize him, to prevent
secession, much less to do so by assuming new executive
powers. His predecessor, James Buchanan, had taken the
position that secession was a violation of the
Constitution, but that he had no constitutional power to
stop it.
Once in power, Lincoln claimed unheard-of emergency
powers. Briefly, he defined secession as insurrection,
raised troops and money on his own initiative without
summoning Congress, suspended habeas corpus, arbitrarily
arrested thousands of dissenting citizens and shut down
anti-war newspapers throughout the North, and even
arrested state legislators and local officials who
refused to support his war. Secession, or even verbal
support for secession, became treason. Lincoln's
brainiest apologist, Harry V. Jaffa, remarks, "No
president before him had ever discovered the reservoir of
constitutional power contained within [the] presidential
oath."
All these measures, according to Lincoln, were
entailed by the proposition that all men are created
equal. As the seceding states were conquered, Lincoln
replaced their elected governments with puppet military
governments answerable to him. This dictatorship was
wholly unconstitutional, of course; yet Lincoln insisted
that the Northern cause was "self-government." And in the
event of a Southern victory, self-government would
"perish from the earth."
It's hardly necessary to ask what Thomas Jefferson
would have thought of all this. For Lincoln, the views
Jefferson had expressed would have marked him as a
traitor, an enemy of the United States. The Sage of
Monticello would have been utterly astounded to hear
Federal tyranny justified in the name of his Declaration.
Far from being Jefferson's legitimate disciple,
Lincoln has bequeathed an anti-Jeffersonian legacy. His
own champions say as much, though without realizing it.
Jaffa's "reservoir of constitutional power," which
Lincoln "discovered," is actually an egregious example of
the "implied powers" Jefferson feared would result from a
lax reading of the "necessary and proper" clause of the
Constitution, as in his National Bank dispute with
Hamilton -- except that Lincoln went much further than
Hamilton ever did.
Since the Civil War, and especially since the New
Deal, the idea of "implied powers" has enabled the
Federal Government to claim and exercise innumerable
powers never delegated in, and alien to, the
Constitution. Most of the government's present powers are
claimed under congressional authority to "regulate
commerce" among the states. In the same spirit, the U.S.
Supreme Court has found countless implications, hitherto
unsuspected, issuing from the application of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Bill of Rights.
These implications are typically said to be
contained in the clauses of the Constitution bestowing,
rather than limiting, Federal power. Meanwhile, the
clauses that prescribe boundaries on that power are
interpreted narrowly, if they are acknowledged at all.
So, for example, the "right of the people to keep and
bear arms" is barely noticed, let alone read expansively,
by the Federal judiciary. The same is true of property
rights. The Tenth Amendment, far from casting penumbras
of inhibition on Federal powers, has been reduced to a
trivial truism, meaning only that the states may have
those powers that the Federal Government doesn't choose
to assume for itself.
In short, states now have all their powers only by
permission of the Federal Government. This is exactly
what Jefferson and others meant by "consolidation."
Federalism has effectively ceased to exist, and the
states are powerless to restore it.
That is the final constitutional result of the War
between the States. Jefferson's revolution has been
reversed; it is nonsense to speak of "Free and
Independent States" now. Lincoln achieved what the
historian James M. McPherson admiringly calls "the second
American Revolution." George Fletcher credits him with
creating a second Constitution. Both are right, though
both shrink from admitting the obvious corollary: that it
was Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy who were fighting
for the principles of the *first* American Revolution and
the *original* Constitution.
Lincoln can be blamed for a whole tradition of
selective constitutional interpretation, which allows the
Federal Government alone to decide authoritatively what
the Constitution means. This too is precisely what
Jefferson, in the Kentucky Resolutions, warned against.
He saw that it must eventually end in boundless Federal
power. But that, of course, is just what recommends it to
the voracious Federal Government. Today few Americans
sense anything amiss in allowing *Federal* courts to
define *Federal* power; the courts are assumed to be
impartial arbiters in cases where their own vested
interests are at stake!
Lincoln's constitutional victory -- essentially, a
victory over Jefferson -- is by now nearly complete. A
president's "greatness" is now reckoned chiefly by his
success in increasing the power of his office and of the
Federal Government as a whole. By this measure, Lincoln
and Franklin Roosevelt are regularly deemed the
"greatest" American presidents for their ability to
surmount constitutional obstacles (or should we say the
obstacle of the Constitution?); with honorable mention to
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Lyndon Johnson.
Not that Jefferson himself was constitutionally
immaculate. As president, his resolve to uphold the
Constitution weakened when Napoleon Bonaparte offered to
sell him a huge swath of North America for less than $15
million. After a feeble attempt to amend the Constitution
to legitimate the purchase, he grabbed the deal.
Thanks to Lincoln, history has forgiven Jefferson.
Few Americans remember, much less comprehend, what he
actually said, and his revolutionary philosophy is now
considered reactionary. The crowning irony is that
Jefferson's greatest single breach of the Constitution is
now remembered as his greatest presidential achievement.
NUGGETS
LIBERAL DEATH WISH: As expected, the state of Florida has
executed Paul Hill for killing an abortionist and his
bodyguard. The usual suspects -- those left-libs who
condemn capital punishment as "legalized murder" -- were
strangely quiet about this one. After all, Hill's crime
was especially heinous: it threatened the precious
constitutional right of legalized murder. (page 8)
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Just how intolerable was the
tyranny of King George III? Well, in 1764, according to
Paul Johnson's HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, "an
Englishman paid an average 25 shillings a year in taxes,
a colonial only sixpence, one-fiftieth." Just think: if
we hadn't won our independence, we might still be paying
at those rates. (page 9)
WHEN HATE IS OKAY: Why is otherwise tolerant progressive
opinion so judgmental about homophobia? Can't they
understand that the Good Lord made some of us homophobic,
and he loves us the way we are? (page 10)
MOVE OVER, SHAKSPERE, YOU'VE GOT COMPANY: France now has
its own version of anti-Stratfordianism. Dominique Labbe,
a French literary scholar, has caused a national uproar
by arguing that the great comedies ascribed to Moliere
were actually written by Pierre Corneille. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR DEPT.: Of course we Americans
wanted self-government, but did we really want quite so
much of it?
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Quagmire in the Sun (August 19, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030819.shtml
* Abe's Pig (August 21, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030821.shtml
* The Living Dollar (August 26, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030826.shtml
* He Had a Dream (August 28, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030828.shtml
* Unfair, Unbalanced, and Very, Very Funny (September 2,
2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030902.shtml
* Bad News from Iraq (September 4, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030904.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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