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Tuesday 31st of December 2019 |
30-DEC-2019 :: The Decade is Drawing to a Close. Africa |
The Decade is drawing to a close. Rumi pronounced that "We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust." And the Mevlana as he was wont to do intuited the Truth We now know that Nearly half of the atoms that make up our bodies may have formed beyond the Milky Way and travelled to the solar system on intergalactic winds driven by giant exploding stars, astronomers claim. The dramatic conclusion emerges from computer simulations that reveal how galaxies grow over aeons by absorbing huge amounts of material that is blasted out of neighbouring galaxies when stars explode at the end of their lives. “Science is very useful for finding our place in the universe,” said Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “In some sense we are extragalactic visitors or immigrants in what we think of as our galaxy.” “Our origins are much less local than we thought,” said Faucher-Giguère. “This study gives us a sense of how things around us are connected to distant objects in the sky.” However Don DeLillo brings us right back to Earth pronouncing We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. The World has been spinning at a dizzying speed and whilst it is only the end of the decade, it somehow feels like the "Fin de Siècle" Changes which are actually taking place at these junctures tend to acquire extra (sometimes mystical) layers of meaning. it certainly feels like a decade of "semiotic arousal" when everything, it seemed, was a sign, a harbinger of some future radical disjuncture or cataclysmic upheaval. On one side we have Economists who opine ''We have never had it so good'' that mankind has entered a Golden Age a miraculous moment of Prosperity, reducing poverty and longevity. On the other side we have a 16 year old Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg announcing ‘How dare you?’: and that ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words’ Millions of People are on the streets from Latin America to Europe, from India to just about everywhere. It feels like a very binary moment. Predicting the Future is now in fact more complex than the computer simulations which revealed how galaxies grew over aeons. Dominic Cummings [Boris Johnson's Advisor] captured this best in a Blog captioned ''The Hollow Men'' Our world is based on extremely complex, nonlinear, interdependent networks (physical, mental, social). Properties emerge from feedback between vast numbers of interactions: for example, the war of ant colonies, the immune system’s defences, market prices, and abstract thoughts all emerge from the interaction of millions of individual agents. Interdependence, feedback, and nonlinearity mean that systems are fragile and vulnerable to nonlinear shocks: ‘big things come from small beginnings’ and problems cascade, ‘they come not single spies / But in battalions’. Prediction is extremely hard even for small timescales. Effective action and (even loose) control are very hard and most endeavours fail. Interestingly he concluded thus They think they are prepared to ‘run the country’ but many cannot run their own diaries. Politics therefore suffers from a surfeit of narcissists. Therefore, the above is my long winded Caveat Emptor. The best investments over the past decade have been as follows Bitcoin: +8,990,000% Netflix: +4,177% Amazon: +1,787% Mastercard: +1,126% Apple: +966% Visa: +824% Starbucks: +800% Bitcoin in fact returned +88% in 2019. As You know I am a Naysayer now. The level of hocus pocus analysis around Bitcoin is now just too much and I am inclined to the view that Bitcoin will likely prove to be an ''intelligence'' level Operation and probably of the Jeffrey Epstein sort. Bitcoin was last at $7,300 and of course it is the epitomy of non linearity so I would like to be short probably closer to $10,000 looking for a an eventual capitulation below a $1,000,00 I remain very bullish Netflix and think its price got impaired this year by a bunch of Johnny come Latelys. In my view Disney will succeed but the others will fall by the wayside. Netflix is at $329.09. I put out a supreme conviction ''Buy'' Alert on 23-SEP-2019 at $270.75 and am reiterating that Buy call targeting $500.00 in 2020 a +51.975% uplift. As You are aware the World continues to surf on a rising tide of Free or nearly free money which has lifted US Stock Indices to all time highs, surged Bond prices and made SSA sovereign Bonds the best performing bonds world wide in 2019. We are in the 9th Innings of this expansion. However, Trump wants to win an election. Xi needs a Truce in the Trade War before the Chinese Economy runs away from him and over the cliff edge. So I appreciate we are at te Fag End of this Party but the Punchbowl just got refilled. Enjoy it a little longer but how much longer is the $64,000 question and remember the unravelling will be non-linear and exponential.
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24 JUN 19 :: Wizard of Oz World. Africa |
We are in ‘’nose-bleed’’ territory. This is ‘’Voodoo Economics’’ and just because we have not rea- ched the point when the curtain was lifted in the Wizard of Oz and the Wizard revealed to be ‘’an ordinary conman from Omaha who has been using elaborate magic tricks and props to make himself seem “great and powerful”’’ should not lull us into a false sense of security.
Home Thoughts
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On The Road The Star January 7th 2013 Africa |
My Christmas holiday ritual is to jump into a car and take the family down to the Coast. The Nairobi-Mombasa road arrows 'into immensities and is 'impossible-to- believe.' It retains a near mystical hold on my imagination and connects me to my childhood and beyond. Dad used to once own an Alfa Romeo [of which there were only three then in the country] and my pilgrimage along that road started then, when we used to come from Mombasa. Now, of course, we set off from Nairobi but the road still has its hold. The landmarks still reach out to me. This time we were swarmed by doves near Emali which was breathtaking. There is still the eerie and deserted very Oscar Niemeyer building which might have been a petrol station with a restaurant. We stopped at Makindu which is like being teleported to Amritsar and on New Years day was packed to the rafters. We always stop at Mackinnon road where there is a shrine which houses the tomb of Seyyid Baghali, a Punjabi foreman at the time of the building of the railway who was renowned for his strength.
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The Mystic of Mackinnon Road - @SonyaKassam Africa |
Mackinnon Road train station lies along the Mombasa-Nairobi highway near Mariakani town. The most outstanding landmark here is the Mackinnon Road Mosque that was built as a result of the tomb of Seyyid Baghali, who was a foreman at the time of building the railway fabled for his tremendous strength and according to many, charmed lifestyle. Travellers, regardless of religion or colour have been making stop overs at the shrine long before independence and are pulling up at the sight to this day. Legend has it that Baghali was a saint whose family tree traced back to the Holy Prophet, a fact that he tried to conceal from the public to no avail. For when he got tired of carrying stones, his ‘laden karai’ (vessel) would float above his head to the consternation of many. By 1940s, when the grave was still covered in bushes, travellers would stop there and ask for boons and generally attribute their safety during their journey to the holy man buried at the tomb. The news spread, a legend started and a reputation of the place grew. People later claimed that Baghali would communicate with man-eaters (lions) who were terrorising the Indian workers and order them to relocate saving the lives of his colleagues.
The Mystic of Mackinnon Road
veiled by bougainvillea within sacred alabastrine walls travellers pause, seek fragrant blessings for onward journeys
the iron snake tracks through unforgiving terrains yet you walk as though treading on rose petals stone laden karai floats over you in reverence, a halo? the python consents to your prayers even the man-eaters daren’t cross perimeters
forgive my impertinence my persistence, my obstinance O Mystic of Mackinnon Road, I discovered
a secret divine within the Lunatic Line’s shrine… those who dare transcend the limits of possibility remain indifferent to accusations of insanity
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September 1, 1939 W. H. Auden - Africa |
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
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OCTOBER 30, 2014 BY DOMINIC CUMMINGS The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction Africa |
Mistah Kurtz—he dead. A penny for the Old Guy We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion… … Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow…’ The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot.
‘You’re a mutant virus, I’m the immune system and it’s my job to expel you from the organism.’ DfE official re Gove’s team. 1. Complexity makes prediction hard. Our world is based on extremely complex, nonlinear, interdependent networks (physical, mental, social). Properties emerge from feedback between vast numbers of interactions: for example, the war of ant colonies, the immune system’s defences, market prices, and abstract thoughts all emerge from the interaction of millions of individual agents. Interdependence, feedback, and nonlinearity mean that systems are fragile and vulnerable to nonlinear shocks: ‘big things come from small beginnings’ and problems cascade, ‘they come not single spies / But in battalions’. Prediction is extremely hard even for small timescales. Effective action and (even loose) control are very hard and most endeavours fail. Blofeld: Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof? Kronsteen: Yes it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.
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Lardo, anchovies picos and ox tongue carpaccio.Source: Sabor @luxury Africa |
Sabor, London
Spanish chef Nieves Barragan has developed a following in London for her authentic and unfussy cooking, showcasing great produce. “I eat there a lot,” says Chris Galvin of Galvin La Chapelle in London. “I love the variety of specials while there are always the seasonal classics, the staff, deep flavors and deliciousness, coupled with the drinks and buzz always make me feel happy to be alive.”
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Frantzen, Stockholm A dish from the Stockholm restaurant, Frantzen. @luxury Africa |
This contemporary restaurant in Stockholm is the pick of two great chefs. Elena Arzak, of Arzak in San Sebastián says: “Great creativity, respect for the product. Björn Frantzén makes you really dream.” Mark Birchall, whose Moor Hall in northern England holds the title of top U.K. restaurant, says: “Every single dish was exquisite but particularly memorable was an amazing fish course; Alfonsino from Norway, sea urchin XO, yuzu kosho beurre blanc with sea-buckthorn oil.”
Political Reflections
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The Field Guide to Tyranny @NewYorker @adamgopnik Law & Politics |
Dictatorship has, in one sense, been the default condition of humanity. The basic governmental setup since the dawn of civilization could be summarized, simply, as taking orders from the boss. Big chiefs, almost invariably male, tell their underlings what to do, and they do it, or they are killed. Sometimes this is costumed in communal decision-making, by a band of local bosses or wise men, but even the most collegial department must have a chairman: a capo di tutti capi respects the other capi, as kings in England were made to respect the lords, but the capo is still the capo and the king is still the king. Although the arrangement can be dressed up in impressive clothing and nice sets—triumphal Roman arches or the fountains of Versailles—the basic facts don’t alter. Dropped down at random in history, we are all as likely as not to be members of the Soprano crew, waiting outside Satriale’s Pork Store.
Only in the presence of an alternative—the various movements for shared self-government that descend from the Enlightenment—has any other arrangement really been imagined. As the counter-reaction to Enlightenment liberalism swept through the early decades of the twentieth century, dictators, properly so called, had to adopt rituals that were different from those of the kings and the emperors who preceded them. The absence of a plausible inherited myth and the need to create monuments and ceremonies that were both popular and intimidating led to new public styles of leadership. All these converged in a single cult style among dictators.
That, more or less, is the thesis of Frank Dikötter’s new book, “How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century” (Bloomsbury). Dikötter—who, given his subject, has a wonderfully suggestive, Nabokovian name—is a Dutch-born professor of history at the University of Hong Kong; he has previously written about the history of China under Mao, debunking, at scholarly length and with a kind of testy impatience, the myth of Mao as an essentially benevolent leader. “How to Be a Dictator” takes off from a conviction, no doubt born of his Mao studies, that a tragic amnesia about what ideologues in power are like has taken hold of too many minds amid the current “crisis of liberalism.” And so he attempts a sort of anatomy of authoritarianism, large and small, from Mao to Papa Doc Duvalier.
Each dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity. Stalin is indicted for having more than 1.5 million people interrogated, tortured, and, in many cases, executed. (“At the campaign’s height in 1937 and 1938 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day,” Dikötter writes.) But Stalin is also held responsible for a nightmarish cultural degradation that occurred at the same time—the insistence on replacing art with political instruction, and with the cult of the Leader, whose name was stamped on every possible surface. As one German historian notes, you could praise Stalin “during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.” This black comedy of egotism could be found even among neo-Stalinist dictators of far later date. In 1985, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s Communist leader, ordered up such television programs as “The Nicolae Ceauşescu Era” and “Science During the Nicolae Ceauşescu Epoch.” By law, his portrait was featured at the beginning of every textbook.
Dikötter’s broader point is that this manner spread to the most improbable corners of the world. His most interesting chapters, in some ways, are on the “tin-pot” dictators—like Duvalier, in Haiti, and Mengistu, in Ethiopia—who, ravaging poverty-stricken countries, still conform to the terrible type. The reason his subjects exhibit a single style is in part mutual influence and hybridization (North Korean artists made Mengistu a hundred-and-sixty-foot-tall monument in Ethiopia), and in part common need. All share one ugliness because all bend to one effect: not charm but intimidation, and not persuasion but fear.
The elements come together in almost every case to make one standard biography. There’s the rise, which is usually assisted by self-deluding opportunists who believe that they can restrain the ascendant authoritarian figure; old Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, countering Trotsky, played just as significant a role in Stalin’s ascent, largely through abstention, as the respectable conservative Franz von Papen did in Hitler’s. (“We can control him” is the perpetual motto of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator.) Next there is the attainment of power, and the increasingly frantic purging, followed by a cult of personality made all the more ludicrous by the passage of time, because it is capable only of inflation, not variation. Along with that comes some re-identification with figures from the national past. The exploitation of the imaginary Aryan history, bestrode by Valhallan gods, became central to the Hitler cult. In the same way, Dikötter shows, Duvalier took up the animism of Haitian vodou and presented himself as the avatar of the cemetery spirit Baron Samedi.
Then comes the isolation of the dictator within his palace—friendless and paranoid—and the pruning of his circle to an ever more sycophantic few. The dictator, rather than exulting in his triumph, withdraws into fearful seclusion. Finally, after all the death and brutality imposed, the dictator’s power, and often his life, ends with remarkable suddenness. You can watch video footage of Ceauşescu, in Bucharest, 1989, confidently addressing an assembled audience and realizing in a single moment that the crowd has turned. “Comrades! Quiet down!” the dictator cries out, while his wife shrilly shouts, “Silence!” The firing squad was only a few days away. Mussolini was ejected just as abruptly, and Hitler would have been, too, if he hadn’t killed himself first. Stalin seemed to make it to a natural end, but, as that terrific movie “The Death of Stalin” shows, he probably died sooner than he otherwise would have, because his flunkies were too terrified to do anything when they found him unconscious in a pool of his own piss.
Still, Dikötter’s portrait of his dictators perhaps underemphasizes a key point about such men: that, horribly grotesque in most areas, they tend to be good in one, and their skill at the one thing makes their frightened followers overrate their skill at all things, like children of a drunken father who take a small act of Christmas charity as proof of enormous instinctive generosity. Compare Dikötter’s account of Hitler’s rise with John Lukacs’s account, and one recalls how Lukacs, without softening the portrait one bit, recognized that Hitler did some things extremely well. Hitler’s occasional moments of shrewdness and even statesmanship—in seeing that Stalin would trust him not to invade Russia, or that France was not prepared to fight—made his followers more convinced than ever of his genius.
The difference between charismatic leadership and the cult of personality—different points in the trajectory of the dictator—is that the charismatic leader must show himself and the object of the cult of personality increasingly can’t show himself. The space between the truth and the image becomes too great to sustain. Mao, like God, could be credibly omniscient only by being unpredictably seen. Imposing an element of mystery is essential. And so most of the subjects here rarely made public appearances at the height of their cults. Stalin and Hitler both remained hidden for much of the war; to show themselves was to show less than their audiences wanted.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s image was everywhere, but, when preparing to greet Richard Nixon, he made much of the imagery disappear. “All signs of the Chairman were removed from window displays,” Dikötter writes. “Thousands of statues were dismantled, discreetly sent off for recycling.” The king or the emperor has his glory channelled into the national religion or ritual; the dictator, rising with a revolution against the old order, is in some sense an iconoclast, and has to be more enigmatic. Months went by in which nobody saw Mussolini; Stalin refused to take part in his own victory parade after the Second World War, leaving the task to his top general, Georgy Zhukov; Duvalier holed up in his palace, then suddenly appeared shopping in little Port-au-Prince boutiques. Sometimes there, sometimes not, now you see him, now you don’t—less the hero of a thousand faces than the overseer with a million eyes. You never know when you’ll see Big Brother—or when he’ll see you.
The really significant historical question is how the modern authoritarian’s cult of personality differs from the monarch’s or the emperor’s. Roman emperors, after all, were actually deified. It matters that the twentieth-century cult of political personality rose in the context of the broader twentieth-century cult of celebrity. Though Chaplin was retrospectively rueful, it was not a crazy notion—and he would use it to fantastic comic effect in “The Great Dictator,” still the best satiric study of dictator style ever created. Fandom and fanaticism made their historical appearance hand in hand. (Even today, Donald Trump likes dictators not only because he likes authoritarians but also because they present themselves, in ways he understands, as kitsch celebrities, with entourages and prepackaged “looks.”)
Dikötter makes a case that there has been a dictator style, stretching across the planet. Is there also a dictator sound—a specific way that they use language? “The Ogre does what ogres can, / Deeds quite impossible for Man,” Auden wrote in 1968, after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. “But one prize is beyond his reach, / The Ogre cannot master Speech.” The idea that language was the last bulwark against lunacy was central, in the middle of the last century, to minds like Camus and Orwell. Lucidity is a test of integrity, as Orwell insisted in “Politics and the English Language.” Tyrants can’t talk sense.
But what if, dreadful idea, the reverse is true—what if language is exactly what the ogres have mastered, and bad people tend to have a better command of language than good ones, who are often tongue-tied in the face of the world’s complexities? What if the tragedies of tyranny were, in the first instance, tragedies of eloquence misapplied—of language used for evil ends, but used well? For centuries, students learned Latin by memorizing the writing of the great Roman tyrant and republic-ending ogre Julius Caesar. They did it exactly because Caesar’s style was so clear, efficiently sorting out Druids and Picts, always focussed on the main point.
The worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers. Hitler died with more than sixteen thousand books in his private libraries; Stalin wrote a book that was printed in the tens of millions, and though that is easier to do when you run the publisher, own all the bookstores, and edit all the book reviews (only Jeff Bezos could hope to do that now), still, he did his own writing. Mussolini co-authored three plays while ruling Italy and was the honorary president of the International Mark Twain Society, writing a greeting to the readers of his favorite author while installed as Duce. Lenin and Trotsky, whatever else they may have done, both wrote more vividly and at greater length than did, say, Clement Attlee or Tommy Douglas—social-democratic politicians who did great good in the world and left few catchy slogans behind. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “The revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao’s apologias for mass killing, may not be admirable sentiments, but they are memorable aphorisms—far more memorable than the contrasting truth that some political power grows out of the barrels of some guns some of the time, depending on what you mean by “power” and “political,” and whom you’re pointing the gun at.
This contrarian hypothesis is nicely put in Daniel Kalder’s “The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy” (Henry Holt). In many ways the literary companion to Dikötter’s book, “The Infernal Library” is the work of a non-academic scholar with a staggering appetite for reading. The same dictators fill both books, but Kalder’s focus is on their words more than their acts. He has worked through a reading list that would leave most people heading desperately for an exit, and an easier subject. Anyone can read “Mein Kampf” who has the stomach for the maunderings of a self-pitying, failed Austrian watercolorist. But Kalder has actually made his way through the philosophy of António de Oliveira Salazar, for decades the semi-fascist quasi-dictator of Portugal, and gives his 1939 tome, “Doctrine and Action,” a fair review. We may have heard that Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism” was printed in the millions, but Kalder has read it, and with a certain kind of devil’s-due respect: “He is clear and succinct, and good at summarizing complex ideas for a middlebrow audience: the Bill Bryson of dialectical materialism, minus the gags.”
Kalder’s point is the disquieting one that the worst tyrants of the past century were hardly the brutal less-than-literates of our imagination. (Hitler, twenty and poor in Vienna, put down “writer” as his occupation on an official document. He wasn’t, but it was what he dreamed of being.) Their power did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It grew out of their ability to form sentences saying that power grew out of the barrel of a gun, when in fact it was growing out of the pages of a book. Mao was even more effective as an advocate than as a general. The trouble with these tyrants’ language was what they used it for.
Kalder proposes Lenin as the originator of the modern totalitarian style in prose, adopting Marx’s splenetic polemical tone for the purposes of Communist revolution. Kalder’s Lenin is a useful corrective to the more benign version of Lenin that still crops up from time to time—partly owing, it must be said, to Edmund Wilson’s 1940 book, “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” Wilson’s Lenin may have been insufficiently sensitive to civil liberties, but he was fundamentally humane and philosophical, a first-rate intellect caught in a first-rate crisis. His flaw was a lack of patience with his own deeply felt humanism, self-censoring even his love of Beethoven in pursuit of the public good. (Following Wilson, Tom Stoppard, in his great 1974 comedy “Travesties,” showed Lenin listening longingly to the “Appassionata” Sonata.) Vladimir Nabokov, who knew better, regularly tried to disabuse Wilson of this belief. “What you now see as a change for the worse (‘Stalinism’) in the regime is really a change for the better in knowledge on your part,” he wrote to Wilson in 1948. “Any changes that took place between November 1919 and now have been changes in the decor which more or less screens an unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror.”
Kalder shares that view. After reading Lenin’s “The State and Revolution,” he writes, “It’s impossible to be surprised that the USSR turned out so badly.” Already in 1905, we learn from Kalder, Lenin is dismissive of the very notion of “freedom” within an exploitative society, writing, “The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist, or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.” It’s significant that the “actress” comes in for Lenin’s disapproval; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, in “The Subjection of Women,” from 1869, had singled out actresses as a cynosure of liberal feminism, since they were the one kind of woman artist whose equality, or superiority, to men was on public display. (Taylor’s daughter Helen, who also worked on the book, was herself an actress.) Demoralizing actresses as mere prostitutes is therefore an essential part of the Marxist attack on bourgeois feminism.
Stalin, in Kalder’s account, not only succeeds Lenin as an author but surpasses him. Against the Trotskyite view of Stalin as a Georgian bandit chief, Kalder argues that Stalin was actually a big thinker and a good writer, capable of popularizing Marx in ways Lenin could not. He was a devoted craftsman of prose, too, as his much marked manuscripts attest. “Because Stalin’s primary means of interacting with the physical world was through paper, it is not surprising that he continued to demonstrate a superstitious awe for the power of the written word,” Kalder observes. “He was still fascinated by books, by novels and plays, and by the arts generally.” Some writers even sought out Stalin for literary advice. The amazing thing is that they got it: one prominent playwright, Alexander Afinogenov, started sending his plays directly to Stalin for a first read, and, despite the burdens of ruling a totalitarian empire, Stalin would get back to him with notes. If you want to know what a country with an editor at its head looks like, there it is.
Stalin, Kalder concludes, “was a naïve romantic, at least insofar as he believed in the transformative power of literature.” He recognized that words shape ideas, and ideas shape souls. In 1932, he cheerfully summoned forty of the leading writers of the Soviet Union to come to dinner, exhorting them with language one might expect from a faculty dean making a case for the humanities: “Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. . . . And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the human soul.” Of the writers who were in that room, Stalin had eleven murdered before the decade was over. Editorial rigor could achieve no more.
After spending time with Stalin, one finds Hitler and Mussolini, taken as authors, almost anticlimactic. Yet Kalder spots something that is hard to articulate but worth brooding on. When Stalin addressed workers who made tractors, he was actually interested in tractors: they were a means toward a more productive Russia. The better life—based on efficient, electrified, and modernized farms—was visible, however many lives you had to take to get there. By contrast, Hitler and Mussolini were apocalyptic pessimists. Their work expends far more energy on the melodrama of decline and decadence, on visions of Jews giving syphilis to Aryan maidens and on the Roman ruins, than on a positive future. (Part of what drew Hitler to the Wagnerian œuvre was the imagery of downfall.) Kalder has read Mussolini’s memoir, written after his deposition, and is struck by the Italian dictator’s self-pitying conviction that the price of power is complete self-enclosure: “If I had any friends now would be the time for them to sympathize, literally to ‘suffer with’ me. But since I have none my misfortunes remain within the closed circle of my own life.” It is significant that his bleak estrangement is what he most wants to register. It really is all about him. This taste for despair was part of both men’s romanticism, and, in Hitler’s case, directly responsible for the horrific last months of a war already lost. He wanted the world to burn. Germany hadn’t deserved him.
Kalder’s analysis suggests another signal difference. The Soviet Union, and left totalitarianism in general, is a culture of the written word; the Third Reich, and right authoritarianism in general, is a culture of the spoken word. Wanting the prestige of authorship but discovering that writing is hard work, Hitler dictated most of “Mein Kampf” to the eager Rudolf Hess. Hitler was always unhappy with the slowness of reading and writing, compared with the vivid electricity of his rallies. Where the Marxist heritage, being theory-minded and principle-bound, involves the primacy of the text, right-wing despotism, being romantic and charismatic, is buoyed by the shared spell cast between an orator and his mob. One depends on a set of abstract rules; the other on a sequence of mutual bewitchments.
Where does the double tour of dictator style leave us? Dikötter, in “How to Be a Dictator,” seems uncertain whether he is writing an epitaph or a prologue to a new edition. On the one hand, he deprecates the continuities between the twentieth-century cults and the more improvisatory autocrats of our day. “Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline,” he maintains. But he sees ominous signs in Erdoğan’s rise, in Turkey, and notes that, in China, Xi Jinping has become consistently idolized by a “propaganda machine.” In 2017, Dikötter points out, “the party organ gave him seven titles, from Creative Leader, Core of the Party and Servant Pursuing Happiness for the People, to Leader of a Great Country and Architect of Modernisation in the New Era.” Meanwhile, he observes, as “the regime makes a concerted effort to obliterate a fledgling civil society, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists and religious leaders are confined, exiled and imprisoned in the thousands.”
Thousands are better than millions, certainly—though historically thousands have a way of leading to millions. If there is little comfort in numbers, there is even less in words. Auden’s noble picture, in which the poets fight the mute ogre, can’t survive the shock of history. The ogres, it turns out, are part of literary culture and always have been—they speak and write books and read other people’s books. If by protecting the integrity of language we mean upholding the belief that literary culture, or even just plain truth-telling, is in itself a bulwark, the facts don’t bear out the hypothesis. Literary culture is no remedy for totalitarianism. Ogres gonna ogre. Rhetoric is as liquid and useful for the worst as it is for the best. The humanities, unfortunately, belong to humanity.
Perhaps the most depressing reflection sparked by both books is on the supine nature of otherwise intelligent observers in the face of the coarse brutalities of dictatorships. Kalder writes, as many have before, about Mao’s successful courtship of Western writers and leaders, who kept the Maoist myth alive as his cult descended into barbaric absurdity. He also writes of finding, in a small Scottish town, a contemporary English translation of Stalin’s “Speech at a Conference of Harvester-Combine Operators,” delivered in December of 1935, including interpolated parentheticals of audience response: “Loud and prolonged cheers and applause. Cries of ‘Long live our beloved Stalin!’ ” The marvel is that the pamphlet had been translated into English within days after the speech was given. “Then,” Kalder observes, “berserk cultists spirited it across the waves, and read it, and found value in it, in a society where nobody was being starved to death, shot in the head or interned in a slave labor camp.” The capacity for self-delusion on the part of cosseted utopians about the actuality of utopia remains the most incomprehensible element of the story of the twentieth century, and its least welcome gift to the twenty-first. ♦
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The 2010s were The End of Normal @nytimes @michikokakutani Law & Politics |
TWO OF THE MOST WIDELY QUOTED and shared poems in the closing years of this decade were William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”), and W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” (“Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth”). Yeats’s poem, written just after World War I, spoke of a time when “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Auden’s poem, written in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland, described a world lying “in stupor,” as democracy was threatened and “the enlightenment driven away.” Apocalypse is not yet upon our world as the 2010s draw to an end, but there are portents of disorder. The hopes nourished during the opening years of the decade — hopes that America was on a progressive path toward growing equality and freedom, hopes that technology held answers to some of our most pressing problems — have given way, with what feels like head-swiveling speed, to a dark and divisive new era. Fear and distrust are ascendant now. At home, hate-crime violence reached a 16-year high in 2018, the F.B.I. reported. Abroad, there were big geopolitical shifts. With the rise of nationalist movements and a backlash against globalization on both sides of the Atlantic, the liberal post-World War II order — based on economic integration and international institutions — began to unravel, and since 2017, the United States has not only abdicated its role as a stabilizing leader on the global stage, but is also sowing unpredictability and chaos abroad. A 2019 Freedom House report, which recorded global declines in political rights and civil liberties over the last 13 years, found that “challenges to American democracy are testing the stability of its constitutional system and threatening to undermine political rights and civil liberties worldwide.” If Lin-Manuel Miranda’s dazzling 2015 musical “Hamilton,” about the founders’ Enlightenment vision of the United States, embodied the hopes and diversity of America during the Obama years, dystopian fables and horror-driven films and television series — including “Black Mirror” (2016), a rebooted “Twilight Zone” (2019), “Joker” (2019), “Get Out” (2017), “Watchmen” (2019), “The Handmaid’s Tale” (2017) and “Westworld” (2016) — spoke to the darkening mood in the second half of the decade, as drug overdose deaths in America rose to nearly half a million by the decade’s end, life expectancy fell in the United States and Britain, and many of us started to realize that our data (tracking everything we viewed, bought and searched for online) was being sold and commodified, and that algorithms were shaping our lives in untold ways. In what was likely the hottest decade on record, scientists warned that climate change was swiftly approaching a “point of no return”; we learned that glaciers were melting at record speed at the top of the world; and fires ravaged California and Australia and threatened the very future of the Amazon rainforest. Many of these troubling developments didn’t happen overnight. Even today’s poisonous political partisanship has been brewing for decades — dating back at least to Newt Gingrich’s insurgency — but President Trump has blown any idea of “normal” to smithereens, brazenly trampling constitutional rules, America’s founding ideals and virtually every norm of common decency and civil discourse. The biggest casualty of the decade was trust. According to a Pew survey earlier this year, only 17 percent of Americans trust the government to do what is right “most of the time" or “just about always.” America’s reputation tumbled even further on the world stage: A 2018 Pew survey of 25 countries found that 70 percent of respondents said they lack confidence that the American president would make the right foreign policy moves. Between the end of President Barack Obama’s second term and late 2018, positive views of America fell 27 percentage points in Germany, 26 points in Canada, and 25 points in France. As with many things, Donald Trump is both a symptom and a radical accelerant of the decline in trust. While exploiting the anger at the establishment that snowballed around the world in response to the 2008 financial crisis, Mr. Trump has also cruelly amplified existing divisions and resentments in America, fueling suspicion of immigrants and minorities and injecting white nationalist views into the mainstream, in efforts to gin up his base. Mr. Trump’s improbable rise benefited from a perfect storm of larger economic, social and demographic changes, and the profoundly disruptive effects of new technology. His ascent also coincided with the rising anxieties and sense of dislocation produced by such tectonic shifts. Around the world, liberal democracy is facing grave new challenges, authoritarianism is on the rise and science is being questioned by “post-fact” politicians. Echoes of Mr. Trump’s nativist populism can be found in Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain’s recent electoral victory and the Brexit referendum of 2016, and in the ascent of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Democracy is under threat in Hungary and Poland. Once fringe right-wing parties with openly racist agendas are rebranding themselves in Sweden and Belgium. And far-right groups in Germany and Spain are now the third-largest parties in those nations’ parliaments. AT THE SAME TIME, Donald Trump remains a uniquely American phenomenon. Although the United States was founded on the Enlightenment values of reason, liberty and progress, there has long been another strain of thinking at work beneath the surface — what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk,” and the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style.” It’s an outlook characterized by a sense of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” Hofstadter wrote in his 1964 essay, and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture, a way of life.” Its language is apocalyptic (Mr. Trump’s “American carnage” is a perfect example); its point of view, extremist. It regards its opponents as evil and ubiquitous, while portraying itself, in Hofstadter’s words, as “manning the barricades of civilization.” The “paranoid style,” Hofstadter observed, tends to occur in “episodic waves.” The modern right wing, he wrote, feels dispossessed: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it.” In their view, “the old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals,” and national independence has been “destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power.” One well-known eruption of the “paranoid style” occurred in the 1950s with the anti-Communist hysteria led by Joseph McCarthy. It would surface again in the 1960s with the emergence on the national stage of George C. Wallace, who ran a presidential campaign fueled by racism and white working-class rage. In his 2018 book “The Soul of America,” the historian Jon Meacham also wrote about the cycles of hope and fear in American history, emphasizing the role that presidents play in setting a tone for the country and defining — or undermining — its founding ideals. He wrote about presidents who have worked to unify the country and appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” and those who have courted discord and division. Lincoln was followed in office by his vice president Andrew Johnson, a champion of white supremacy who pardoned more than 7,000 Confederates and opposed the 14th Amendment. Johnson was impeached in 1868: And while he was not convicted in the Senate, the historian Brenda Wineapple argues, the House’s decision to impeach him implied “the glimmering hope of a better time coming, a better government, a fairer and more just one” down the road in the years to come. MR. MEACHAM NOTES that “extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress.” Periods, that is, like our own, when change of every sort is blowing across the globe. The event that turned people’s sense of dislocation and disillusionment into populist anger on both the right (the Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street and, later, Bernie Sanders’s candidacy) was the 2008 financial crisis. Trust in government had been in sharp decline in previous decades — driven by Watergate and Vietnam in the 1970s, and more recently by the invasion of Iraq and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction there, and by frustration with worsening partisan gridlock in Washington. But the lingering fallout of the 2008 crash — growing income inequality, declining social mobility and dwindling job security — ignited rage against the elites and the status quo. While the banks were bailed out and the fortunate 1 percent soon made back its losses (and more), working- and middle-class voters struggled to make up lost ground. Many students realized they were looking at jobs in the gig economy and years of crippling debt, while workers in the manufacturing sector found themselves downsized or out of work. As a candidate, Mr. Trump sold himself as the champion of such voters — whom he called “the forgotten men and women” — and he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. But once in office, he enlarged the swamp, hiring some 281 lobbyists, and set about cutting taxes for corporations and the very rich. He also began a war on the institutions that were the very pillars of the government he now headed. In early 2017, Mr. Trump’s then adviser and strategist Steve Bannon vowed that the administration would wage a tireless battle for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the administration has done so ever since — nihilistically trying to undermine public faith in the efficacy, the professionalism, even the mission of the institutions that are crucial for guarding our national security, negotiating with foreign governments and ensuring the safety of our environment and workplaces. Mr. Trump also launched chilling attacks on those he reviled — from the F.B.I. to the judiciary — for having failed to put loyalty to him ahead of loyalty to the Constitution. This is familiar behavior among authoritarians and would-be dictators, who resent constitutional checks and balances, and who want to make themselves the sole arbiters of truth and reality. A reporter said that in 2016 when she asked Mr. Trump why he continually assailed the press, he replied: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” It was fitting, then, that in January 2017, the month of his inauguration, George Orwell’s classic novel “1984” shot to the top of best-seller lists. The nearly 70-year-old novel suddenly felt unbearably timely with its depiction of a world in which the truth is whatever Big Brother says it is. One of the terrible ironies of Mr. Trump’s presidency is that his administration’s dysfunction — little to no policymaking process on many issues, impulsive decision-making, contempt for expertise and plunging morale at beleaguered agencies — creates a toxic feedback loop that further undermines public trust in the government and lends momentum to his desire to eviscerate the “deep state.” The conflicts of interest that swirl around Mr. Trump and his cronies further increase the public’s perception of corruption and unfairness. MEANWHILE, TECTONIC SHIFTS were occurring in technology: Not just game-changing developments in artificial intelligence, genetic research and space exploration, but also new platforms, apps and gadgets that almost immediately altered people’s daily habits, including Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), the iPad (2010), Uber (2009), and digital assistants Siri (2011) and Alexa (2014). In these years, we also developed a growing appreciation of technology’s dark side: Gamergate, N.S.A. surveillance, Russian attacks on our elections, the fear that you might not only lose your job to a stranger on the other side of the planet, but also to robots in your hometown. In the 2010s, we also became addicted to podcasts, and binge-watching became a thing. In fact, immersion or escape into compelling fictional worlds seemed to be one strategy people were embracing to cope with political outrage fatigue. Perhaps this also explains why nostalgia became so popular in the 2010s with reboots and returns of old television shows like “Mad About You,” “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files,” “Dynasty,” “Lost in Space,” “Roseanne,” “Will & Grace,” “Gilmore Girls” and “The Odd Couple” — a phenomenon that’s both a reflection of the retro-mania catalyzed by the endless availability of old content on the web and a longing for older, saner times. With his calls to “Make America Great Again,” Mr. Trump appealed to a different sort of nostalgia — for an era when white men were in charge and women, African Americans, Hispanics and immigrants knew their place. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his campaign revived the culture wars of the 1960s and ’70s, and politicized everything from football and Starbucks coffee cups (criticized by some evangelicals for being too secular and part of the “war on Christmas”) to plastic straws and windmills. It might have been funny if we were living in a satirical novel, not in the real world with a former reality TV star as president. In his insightful forthcoming book, “Why We’re Polarized,” Ezra Klein observes that “our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities.” This is coming at a moment when the nation’s demographics are rapidly changing — census statistics project that America will become “minority white” in 2045 — and putting more emphasis than ever on questions of identity. Our political identities have become so crucial to us, Mr. Klein writes, that “we will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.” It’s a measure of just how partisan our politics has become that most Republicans now reflexively support Mr. Trump — despite broken promises, ballooning deficits, and tariffs that have hurt Americans, never mind the astonishing volume of lies he emits. Many Trump supporters inhabit a soundproofed echo chamber: A 2017 study, published in the Columbia Journalism Review, found that pro-Trump audiences got most of their information from an insulated media system, anchored around Breitbart News, that reinforced “the shared worldview of readers” and shielded “them from journalism that challenged it.” No surprise, then, that the president’s hard-core supporters stubbornly repeat the lies and conspiracy theories that cycle through his Twitter feed, connecting him with Russian trolls, white nationalists and random crackpots, or that Mr. Trump’s assertions and fictional narratives are amplified further by Republican politicians and the right-wing media noise machine. Social media, which came into its own in the 2010s, accelerated the filter bubble effect further, as algorithms designed to maximize user “engagement” (and therefore maximize ad revenues) fed people customized data and ads that tended to reinforce their existing beliefs and interests. This is why Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, increasingly have trouble even agreeing upon shared facts — a development that has undermined trust between different groups, fueled incivility and sped up the niche-ification of culture that began years ago with the advent of cable television and the internet. In addition, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have enabled politicians (as well as advertisers, Russian agents and alt-right conspiracy theorists) to circumvent gatekeepers like the mainstream media and reach out directly to voters. “Influencers” replaced experts, scientists and scholars; memes and misinformation started to displace facts. As the news cycle spun faster and faster, our brains struggled to cope with the flood of data and distraction that endlessly spilled from our phones. And in an era of data overload and short attention spans, it’s not the most reliable, trustworthy material that goes viral — it’s the loudest voices, the angriest, most outrageous posts that get clicked and shared. Without reliable information, citizens cannot make informed decisions about the issues of the day, and we cannot hold politicians to account. Without commonly agreed upon facts, we cannot have reasoned debates with other voters and instead become susceptible to the fear-mongering of demagogues. When politicians constantly lie, overwhelming and exhausting us while insinuating that everyone is dishonest and corrupt, the danger is that we grow so weary and cynical that we withdraw from civic engagement. And if we fail to engage in the political process — or reflexively support the individual from “our” party while reflexively dismissing the views of others — then we are abdicating common sense and our responsibility as citizens. In his wise and astonishingly prescient “Farewell Address,” from 1796, George Washington spoke of the dangers he saw the young new nation facing in the future. He warned against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” “the impostures of pretended patriotism,” and, most insistently, of “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” — imploring his fellow citizens not to let partisan or geographic differences plant seeds of mistrust among those who “ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” Every portion of the country, he wrote, should remember: “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” Citizens, he urged, must indignantly frown “upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
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Revelation 6:12-13: When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood Law & Politics |
Revelation 6:12-13: When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earth- quake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale.
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Australia: Thousands trapped on beach as fires approach @dwnews Law & Politics |
More than 4,000 people were trapped on a beach by advancing fires in southeast Australia on Tuesday as devastating blazes encircled the seaside town of Mallacoota, where sea or airborne evacuation was being planned. "Mallacoota is under attack, it is pitch black and very scary," Victoria's Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp said. "We have 4,000 people on the beach and nearby who are protected by our firefighters."
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Among sub-Saharan African stock markets, Kenya's proved the best performer over the past decade @business @adengat Africa |
Among sub-Saharan African stock markets, Kenya’s proved the best performer over the past decade, joined only by South Africa in producing dollar-based gains since 2010 as currency depreciation ravaged returns for investors. Nairobi’s benchmark gauge climbed 74% since the decade opened, with Johannesburg’s benchmark up just short of 9%. The Zambian and Nigerian stock markets have retreated almost 50%. MSCI Inc.’s gauge of developing country stocks has gained 13%, while its frontier-markets index has advanced 12%. Aside from the weak showing from equity benchmarks, the period was characterized by a dwindling number of listed companies on the region’s major exchanges, from Lagos to Johannesburg. Nigeria has the fewest number of listed companies since 2004, while in South Africa the tally hasn’t been this low in 16 years. “Traditionally, private equity firms have been exiting through the stock exchanges,” Karim Hajji, president of the African Securities Exchanges Association, said in a phone interview. “But in recent years we have witnessed a different trend, where private equity firms are selling to other private equity funds or they are making straight sales to industries that are in the same sector.”
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Uganda plans to borrow nearly $2 bln to fund 2020/21 budget @ReutersAfrica Africa |
Uganda said it plans to borrow 6.9 trillion shillings ($1.89 billion) from external lenders in the 2020/2021 (July-June) fiscal year to partly finance its budget, which could come under pressure as veteran leader Yoweri Museveni seeks re-election. Public spending typically surges in election periods in Uganda, which has some times triggered pressure on consumer prices and the local currency. The paper said economic growth in 2020/2021 would be 6.2%, driven by higher productivity in manufacturing and agriculture and “public and private sector investment as well as regional and domestic trade.” Uganda’s mounting public debt has been fuelling concern. The International Monetary Fund has urged authorities to rein in borrowing. Some opposition critics have also accused government of front-loading debt before an expected windfall from oil sales. Uganda hopes to commence crude oil production in 2022. This month, the government said it was planning to borrow 600 million euros ($661 million) from international banks to plug a hole in its 2019/2020 budget after domestic revenue collections fell short by 9%.
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