Here's some REAL fascism
UKRAINE ON FIRE - The Real Story. Full Documentary by Oliver Stone (Original English version) from Robin Westenra on Vimeo.Meanwhile in Ukraine….
Frank Lee
13
July, 2018
In
one of the largest, if not the largest, Neo-Nazi demonstration in
Europe since WW2, 20,000 fascists and their supporters marched
through the streets of the Ukrainian capital celebrating the birth of
Stepan Bandera 01.01.1909 founder and leader of the ultra-nationalist
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and its military wing,
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) commanded by Roman Shukhevych.
This organization which along with the equally collaborationist
outfit, the 14th Waffen SS Grenadier Division Galicia 1, were
responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and
Russians during the ethnic cleansing which began in Lviv with a
pogrom of the city’s Jews a week after the German invasion in 1941,
and in the western Ukraine between 1943-45.
Russian
state media RT and Sputnik News featuring fascists throwing Nazi
salutes and parading in their tens of thousands in a European capital
apparently didn’t concern any of the major western news outlets,
however, nor the EU for that matter, which is to be expected. Nothing
reported on BBC, France24, CNN, New York Times, The Guardian…the
silence of the media lambs when it comes to a growing fascist
movement in Ukraine is deafening. Although it should be said The
Times of Israel did report on 28th April 2018 on this event with the
headline: 50 US Congress members call out Ukraine government for
glorifying Nazis. Credit where it’s due perhaps.
But
for the western MSM in general this reaction to a blatant display of
out-and-out fascism is par for the course. It would not be stretching
credulity to say that nearly 100% of the MSM reporting on the Ukraine
is frankly, ignorant, made-up, fake and mendacious, and this applies
particularly to the liberal media; to be even more specific to The
Guardian team, of Luhn, Harding and Walker who seem to have made a
career of Russophobia and fake news. Their ‘journalism’ of the
courtesan in its essence is quite simple: What are my principles?
What would you like them to be?
Searching
for a more honest and objective appraisal outside of the usual
suspects takes some effort and perseverance, but occasionally this
yields dividends. One such gold nugget is the recent publication of
the book Ukraine
in the Crossfire (Clarity
Press, Atlanta, 2017) by Chris Kaspar De Ploeg, a Dutch gentleman,
freelance journalist and political analyst. The author doesn’t take
sides overtly but tries to sift out the facts of the present conflict
– a conflict buried under a sea of lies, and insinuations. For
example: “Whilst
remaining critical of Russia and the Donbass rebellion he
demonstrates that many of the recent disasters can be traced to the
Ukrainian ultranationalists” (neo-Nazis), “pro-western
political elites” (Poroshenko,
Kolomoisky, Tymoshenko) “and
their European and North-American backers.” (Cover
blurb)
Much
of the book is devoted to a re-telling of the events leading up to
the Maidan coup of February 2014 which brought the present regime to
power. All of these events have been extensively covered elsewhere
and I don’t want to go over old ground here. But other events and
developments which were not apparent at the time – e.g., the
unstable relationship between the oligarchs and the neo-Nazis as well
as the intra-oligarch struggles for prestige and power, and, perhaps
even more importantly, the calamitous economic and social descent of
Ukraine into almost third world status; all have been carefully
brought to light by the author.
In
political terms De Ploeg argues that Ukraine is not a classical
neo-Nazi state, but one where the neo-Nazis and the oligarchs rule,
if this is the right word, in a forced symbiotic relationship. The
oligarchs control the government and state institutions whereas the
ultranationalist stormtroopers control the streets.
(This
is eerily comparable to Weimar Germany in the 1930s. At that time The
Nazi stormtroopers – the SA – were running amok and clamouring
for a national socialist revolution. Hitler was soon made to
understand that the Junker class which officered the Wehrmacht, Navy,
Civil Service as well as the Eastern agrarians were less than
enamoured with the SA and its national socialism; they wanted order
restored – pronto. Thus, after having been appointed to Chancellor
by Hindenburg, Hitler lost no time in appropriating state power,
passed the enabling acts, and arranged the disbanding of the SA which
was duly enacted during the bloody Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
This intra-Nazi coup was carried out by Hitler’s Pretorian Guard,
the SS, involving the mass murder of the SA leadership, Ernst Roehm,
Gregor and Otto Strasser et al. The SA had done their job and were
now dispensable. One should never underestimate the radical
opportunism of fascism.)
Historical
comparisons aside, it remains an open question as to whether or not
Ukraine’s delicate balance of parliamentary, semi-parliamentary and
anti-parliamentary forces can continue to co-exist, and for how long.
For one thing the armed ultra-nationalist militias – The Tornado
Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, The Azov Battalion, Right Sector and
Svoboda militias, all volunteers – are more reliable and
politically motivated than the regular Ukrainian army and police
force and have their own political objectives. This is one problem
which confronts the Kiev oligarchy. However, in addition to keeping
the ultra-nationalists on a tight lead, Poroshenko and his government
also have to deal with the internal intra-oligarch struggles
involving other political actors jockeying for position and
preferment and seeking their own share of the spoils. Consequently,
this unlikely coalition is very brittle and might easily fracture in
any future political/military crisis, which means that the
‘government’ has to tread very carefully when trying to assert
its authority.
“Acceptance
of the far-right and other dubious figures has not been universal.
The commander of the Tornado Battalion for example was eventually
arrested and is now facing prosecution. But such cases are rare and
highly selective. In fact, is not clear that the state can control
the ultranationalist militias at this point, multiple cases against
far-right activists have been dismissed after there organizations
threatened the concerned judges in court…there have also been a
number of clashes between police including a shoot-out between
Right-Sector and law enforcement officers in the west of the country
leaving 7 wounded.[1]
The
ultra-nationalists, therefore, although a significant force are not
necessarily the dominant political power in Ukraine; per contra this
does not preclude their considerable presence and influence on the
policies of the Kiev Junta. The regime has to a significant degree
trimmed its sails to the demands of the ultra-nationalists and
allowed them to openly flaunt their guns on the streets; these same
ultra-nationalists for their part have to accept that they can’t
always have their own way. One of the ploys by the Kiev regime for
dealing with the situation has been to assimilate some of the
neo-Nazi militias into the regular army and police forces. But being
part of the Ukrainian National Guard has not prevented the Azov
Regiment threatening the state either.
Making
common cause with the ultra-nationalists the Junta coalition has
successfully blocked the implementation of the Minsk accords. From
the outset the ultra-nationalists made it clear that the war in
Donbass was going to go on. Furthermore, and contrary to the
conventional wisdom, the regime never had any serious interest in
ending the hostilities; rather they were brought to the bargaining
table by the heavy defeats of the Ukrainian military during the
battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo in 2014/2015. Poroshenko was
desperate to stop his army disintegrating and his presence in the
peace process was merely a gambit to buy time for his battered army,
he later admitted as much.
Regarding
the war in the Eastern oblasts, De Ploeg makes two subsidiary points:
firstly, that this is not an ordinary war but is a war of
extermination, (ethnic cleansing if we are being polite), and this is
not a view peculiar to the ultra-nationalists, it also permeates the
whole of Ukraine west of the Dnieper.
Secondly, it was also certainly
the view of the Junta and is common fare among the educated middle
class.
Descriptions
of the ethnic Russian minority are endowed with such charming little
epithets such as ‘filth’ ‘pests’ or a ‘plague.’ Donbass
civilians had become the new Untermensch inhabiting the east and
south of the country, which, according to Yulia Tymshenko, our
braided heroine, answers: On a question of what to do with the 8
million Russians left inside the Ukraine she says:
They must be killed with nuclear weapons.”
(She
later stated that what she said had been taken out of context –
naturally!)
To
repeat, such views were not the simply held by ultra-nationalists,
they have become the received wisdom of the centre-right and
right-wing politicians and journalists.
…Keith Gessen writing for the London Review of Books that even moderate liberals were anxious to get rid of the Donbass residents who had thwarted their European aspirations for decades with their voting behaviour, he quoted an insightful source thus,”
All the enemies of progress in one place, all the losers and has beens; wouldn’t it be better just to solve the problem once and for all? Wouldn’t it just be a better long-term solution just to kill as many as you could and scare the shit out of the rest of them forever?’’ ‘This is what I heard from respectable people in Kiev. Not from the nationalists, but from liberals, professionals and journalists. All the bad people were in one place, why not just kill them all.’ [2]
No
South African type reconciliation here then? Quite simply unabashed,
naked genocide comparable with Israel’s treatment of the
Palestinians. Wow! With moderates like these who needs fascists!
Within
the Ukrainian body politic the complete acceptance of
ultra-nationalist ideas and personnel within the mainstream
institutions has become a test of loyalty to the regime. There is a
roll call of ultra-nationalists in Parliament, and in state
institutions, as well as in the militias. The most prominent being
such as Andriy Parubiy. Mr. Parubiy, MP now the speaker in the
Ukrainian Parliament, has a biography littered with overt activity as
one of the leading figures at the nexus of the Ukrainian
ultra-nationalist and outright neo-Nazi movements. Then comes Andriy
Yevhenovych Biletsky MP, Lieutenant Colonel of police, former
political prisoner and university instructor. He is a co-founder and
former leader of the multi-organizational ultra-nationalist and
neo-Nazi movement “Social-National Assembly”.
The
head of the Patriots of Ukraine group, whose statements could easily
be mistaken for the rabid polemics of Nazis during WWII: Founder of
the Azov Battalion:
Our National body should start with a racial cleansing of the Nation […] a healthy racial body will revive […] culture, language and everything else.”
We must pay attention to the question of the value of race. Ukrainians are a part (and one of the largest and the highest in quality) of the European White Race.”
The historical mission […] is to head and lead the White Peoples of the whole world in the last crusade for their existence. A crusade against Semite-led sub-humanity.”
This
could have been straight out of Mein Kampf.
Turning
to the economic and social ramifications of the 2014 coup it will be
observed that the full weight of the neo-liberal economic policies
has been foisted on the Ukraine, courtesy of the IMF. This was
already apparent in the early 80s but the trend accelerated after the
coup. The standard IMF/WTO Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) a
package of ‘reforms’ and ‘fiscal consolidation’ (I just love
these IMF euphemisms) consisted of cuts in government expenditure,
accompanied by extensive liberalisation of product and labour
markets, together with abandonment of exchange rate control and
capital flows. These policies along with political instability have
had, among other things, a disastrous effect on population growth.
Ukraine’s population was 52 million in 1992 and the decline started
in that year. By 2016, this figure had fallen to 42.5 million, its
1960 figure, and was accelerated since the coup of 2014. The current
Fertility rate stands at 1.3. Any figure less than 2 will mean a
shrinking population. The death rate has also increased, along with
mass migration with some 2 million Ukrainian guest workers decamping
to Russia and Poland in search of work. This is a slow-motion
demographic calamity.
Although
a certain Mr Anatoly Karlin writing in the Unz Review has a rather
different, rose-tinted view of the Ukrainian economic recovery, the
bald fact is that none of the indicators carry any hope of a
long-term revival. The fact of economic disaster as measured in
various statistics is, however, unmistakable: Debt-to-GDP ratio has
climbed steadily to 85%, per capita income languishes at US$2,200
(compared to El Salvador US$4,200). Unemployment stands at
(officially at least) 10%, and in terms of external trade the current
account has not been positive since 2003, those glorious days which
gave rise to the ‘Orange revolution’. Finally, there are the
rating agencies who provide the following ratings for Ukraine’s
sovereign bonds– S&P, B-minus, Moody’s, Caa, and Fitch,
B-minus, which means below investment grade if we are being polite,
junk bonds if we are not.[3]
The currency – the hryvnia, exchange rate against the British pound
is £1 = 35, hyrvinia. When I was last in Ukraine (2012) you would
get only between 8 and 12 hyrvnia for a £. Welcome to the Sunflower
Republic.
All
of this in spite of the IMF’s loan and its unilateral debt
forgiveness of the Ukraine’s outstanding debt to Russia which had
become due. In doing this the IMF infringed its own constitution. As
Michael Hudson explains:
The IMF broke four of its rules by lending to Ukraine:(i) Not to lend to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan (the “No More Argentinas” rule, adopted after the IMF’s disastrous 2001 loan to that country).(ii) Not to lend to a country that repudiates its debt to official creditors (the rule originally intended to enforce payment to U.S.-based institutions).(iii) Not to lend to a country at war – and indeed, destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan.
Finally (iv), not to lend to a country unlikely to impose the IMF’s austerity “conditionalities.” Ukraine did agree to override democratic opposition and cut back pensions, but its junta proved too unstable to impose the austerity terms on which the IMF insisted.
This
was obviously a political decision made by an organization which is
supposed to be politically neutral.
The
monumental stupidity of a nation which subordinates economic
common-sense to anti-Russian gestures and rhetorical bluster was
visibly illustrated in the trade deal involving the import of
European gas and South African coal to the exclusion of Russian gas
and Donbass coal.
In both cases, however, Ukraine was simply buying the same goods from Donbass and Russia but resold at a significantly higher price by South Africa and Europe simply acting as middle-men at a huge cost to the Ukrainian tax-payer. [4]
All
of which illustrates the intractable political and economic debacle
unfolding and goes some way to explaining the present impasse of a
backward movement into under-development. Ukraine is becoming
deindustrialised – not unlike the fate of many post-soviet nations
– its trade with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)
Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan severed. This was formerly a
very large and important export-import market, imports consisting of
energy commodities coming from the EEU, and exports to the EEU
consisting of Ukraine’s advanced industries in the east situated in
Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zhaporizyha and Nikolayev
oblasts. These exports consisting of machinery, equipment, aircraft,
vessels, nuclear reactors and boilers, railway, tramway rolling
stocks and inorganic chemicals.
…The machinery industry alone had an annual revenue of nearly US$20 billion and is responsible for employing 600,000 people in the southern and eastern oblasts. Not only would trade disruptions in the EEU devastate the southern and eastern economies, they would also lead to the deindustrialisation of the Ukraine, and this process has already started.” [5]
Apart
from Moldova, Ukraine is now the poorest country in Europe. And once
the process of deindustrialisation starts, charting a way back will
be very difficult, even with the best will in the world and with the
necessary manpower, skills and expertise to carry out such a
transformation. Moreover, this imbecility is compounded by military
expenditures including the costs of an army of 250,000 that is doing
nothing other than getting drunk and occasionally shelling towns and
villages – against International Law it might be added – on the
front line in the Donbass. Ukraine’s defence expenditure stands at
3.7% of GDP compared with NATO’s 2% and most NATO countries don’t
even reach 2%. For the pen-ultimate poorest country in Europe this is
frankly bizarre. If you wanted to run a country and its economy into
the ground this is the way to do it.
De
Ploeg does not spare the EU which has a great deal to answer for this
situation. In making promises which it had no intention of keeping
Brussels, particularly in the shape the Eastern Partnership –
brainchild of the unprepossessing Swedish/Polish neo-con axis of Carl
Bildt and Radislow Sikorski – has served basically as an instrument
of EU/US foreign policy aimed at detaching ex-soviet republics from
Russia’s borders to weaken Russia. This along more directly with
the US involvement as exemplified by the antics of Nuland and Pyatt,
together with CIA-front outfits such as the National Endowment for
Democracy, lavishly equipped with a mandate to wrest Ukraine out of
the Russian sphere of influence. But there was never going to be a
full economic integration of Ukraine into the EU, because, apart from
sunflower seeds, Ukraine has little to offer Europe in return; and it
has also been subject to import penetration by EU products to the
extent that it runs what has become a permanent deficit on current
account. What export industry existed in the Ukraine prior to the
coup was fatally damaged by the 2014 split. According to the Vienna
Institute of International Studies,
Rather than austerity Ukraine will need a huge ‘Marshall Plan’ to reconfigure Ukraine’s economic composition, requiring massive investment if it is to replace its post-Soviet industry – which seems especially now that the industry heartlands of the Donbass have been severed from the Ukraine. Currently, however, it seems that such financing would only come in the form of loans with conditions attached, which ensures a lack of investment for modern industries and rather optimize the continued export of unprocessed Ukrainian resources.”[6]
Unsurprisingly
no-one is rushing to pick up the tab for this new ‘Marshall Plan’
Certainly not the EU, and even less so the Americans, who simply
wanted yet another east European state (qua protectorate) to serve as
a military base aimed at confronting Russia. It seems generally
agreed that the current financial aid on offer will be totally
insufficient for the massive reconstruction costs of Ukraine, and
moreover, there will be additional ‘strings’ or
‘conditionalities’ in IMF-speak attached. This would almost
certainly incur long-term debt peonage for Ukraine. So, this option
would seem to be ruled out. However, such monies which have been
forthcoming through loans to the Kiev regime, both private and
public, have been sufficient to keep the war going and the regime
afloat.
Therefore, these institutions are essentially financing a proxy war with Russia as well as severing Ukraine economically from its neighbour.”[7]
Ukraine
also carries a great deal of political/ideological baggage considered
to be incommensurate with the EUs putative democratic values. Those
neo-Nazi torch-lit processions in Kiev – pure 1930s Nazi pastiche,
redolent and worthy of Leni Riefenstahl – are a little difficult to
square with the EUs professed liberal-democratic idealism.
In
the final sections of the book the author moves on to discuss the
broader geopolitical aspects and the degree which they impinged on
the Ukrainian imbroglio. The coup itself was a long time in the
making, and in a sense was a continuation of the Yuschenko/Tymoshenko
Orange revolution of 2004 which soon became unpopular with its
electorate. The collapse in living standards led to public resentment
against reform and the beneficiaries of privati- sation. National
opinion polls conducted in 2005, after the Orange evolution, revealed
widespread social and political disillusionment: only 23 per cent of
the population believed that they had the ‘ability to live under
the new social conditions’, 51 per cent felt that their health care
was ‘insufficient’ and 44 per cent were absolutely or somewhat
dissatisfied with life in general. The Orange ‘revolution’ was to
fizzle out in an acrimonious spat between Yuschenko and Tymoshenko;
but this was just the trial run. From this point on Yanukovych,
elected President in 2010 and his government, a coalition of the
Party of the Regions and the Communists became the target of a colour
revolution.
Nobody
should be in any doubt about both the overt and covert role played by
both US and EU officials in the formation of the future interim
government. Throughout this period EU and high-ranking US officials
openly engaged in Ukraine’s internal affairs. The US Ambassador,
Geoffrey Pyatt and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland (wife of neo-con theorist Robert
Kagan) were, during the disturbances, strolling around Independence
square reassuring the protestors that America stood behind them. This
action could never have taken place without being sanctioned at the
highest level. Nuland was to later give a talk at the Washington
Press Club in which she mentioned the 5 billion US$s funded by the
various US/EU organizations and affiliates. Presumably five billion
dollars is the going rate for colour revolutions, please apply to G.
Soros, the Open Society.com. Bitcoin will be accepted. Moreover, CIA
front organizations including the aforementioned National Endowment
for Democracy, as well as USAID, and Human Rights Watch, were deeply
involved in this process.
Somebody
(I don’t know who) once said ‘Wars are a racket’. De Ploeg
mentions this in a cursory reference. The bald fact is that the whole
episode was in macro terms the expansion and enlargement of EU/NATO
to the east and the military/political encirclement of Russia. The
operation in Ukraine was engineered to move it out of its
geo-strategic position and at the same time to embed it firmly into
the EU-NATO bloc; this was part of this larger US grand strategy. It
is still very much a Work in Progress, however, but things haven’t
turned out in quite the way as the architects of the original plan
envisaged.
EU
status beyond the Association Agreement was never on the cards for
the foreseeable future, but a possible de facto NATO membership is a
possibility. ‘The
US Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Affairs,
Elissa Slotkin, stated that the Ukrainian Army will be interoperable
with NATO forces by 2020.’ [8]
Now
we are getting to the heart of the matter. US geopolitical strategy
is predicated upon a hegemonic project to establish a system of
dominance over the entire world. This desired outcome was nothing if
not ambitious and is a common feature of all historically crackpot
utopian schemes. This explains the US’s concurrent wars in the
middle-east, the South China Sea, and in Europe – EUROCOM – with
Ukraine as the spearhead. The object was initially to occupy western
Europe through NATO and the EU, then spread this to eastern Europe,
resulting in a de facto occupation and vassalisation of the European
continent.
The
fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to end this east-west military
confrontation. Surprisingly Gorbachov fell for this superficial
patter and involuntarily gave the green light for the US and its
allies to carry out their expansionist plans; the EU/NATO monolith
was set in motion. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded but NATO grew bigger
and moved eastwards. An excuse was needed to explain this apparent
contradiction. It came with the Ukrainian crisis and the corollary of
supposed ‘Russian aggression’.
…the war in Ukraine serves to keep the EU in line with the wider US agenda. We have seen since the Ukraine crisis, the existence and expansion the NATO alliance has found new legitimation – which remains a pivotal organization for US influence over the EU … In addition, Germany and France have allowed NATO to deploy troops in the Baltic states and to continue EU membership invitations to post-soviet countries.”
The
comment has been made that NATO’s continued existence serves to
solve the problems it created [9].
When we look at the big picture everything drops into place. The
Uni-polar moment hasn’t yet passed into history, but it is passing.
A multi-front, multi-theatre war against a huge bloc of countries
straddling Eurasia is becoming impossible, and as a matter of fact it
always was. Internal, possibly intractable problems within the EU and
USA are weakening both the capability and will of the empire to
pursue what should now be considered a utopian aim. In his own stupid
way, Trump, realises this, because he is not ideological. His
opponents – the war party coalition, of Lindsey Graham, John
McCain, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, the entire media, both houses of
Congress, the Neo-Cons ensconced if their various think-tanks, and
institutions, the Democrat and Republican parties, clearly are
solidly against any detente and will fight any movement towards it,
however minimal.
So,
this is where we are at the present time. Ukraine has become the
catspaw in a wider struggle involving outside actors and in the short
run is condemned to inexorable decline – according to the Bloomberg
misery index Ukraine comes 7th on the list of miserable countries –
and in the longer run to a possible break-up. Ukraine isn’t
collapsing, it has simply collapsed – collapsed into a long-term
economic depression (An economic depression is usually defined as a
severe downturn followed by a weak recovery then a long period of
sub-optimal growth) but Ukraine’s depression is also both cultural,
social, economic and political. It is not merely the most
concentrated areas of the Russian-speaking east – the Crimea,
Donetsk and Lugansk – where secession has become a virtual fait
accompli, and large areas of these latter two oblasts are subject to
a virtual occupation by the Ukrainian Army, and viewed as much, but
there are also areas of the east – Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk,
Zaporozhe and Nikolayev, which whilst they did not secede are not the
most enthusiastic supporters of the Kiev regime.
Additionally,
Hungarian and Romanian national minorities in Transcarpathia and
Bessarabia may well become restive – of which there are signs
already – given the majority monist view, from Kiev to Lviv, that
Ukraine should have one language, one culture, one identity – a
utopian nonsense forming the twisted idealism of Bandera and his
latter-day followers. Such an undertaking was bound to fail in such a
multi-cultural and multi-linguistic environment.
In
the words of Edmund Burke:
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”[10]
NOTES:
- [1] The German publication Der Spiegel reported on the Tornado Battalion ‘’who had prisoners tutored by means of an object similar to a power generator. The prisoners were held in a basement, stripped naked, place on a concrete wall and doused with water. They were touched with live wires, such as at the temple, genitals and testicles … According to a statement of a former prisoner, ‘prisoners were force under the threat of death to rape another prisoner.’’ (Hahn, G.M. – 05 October 2015 – America’s Ukraine Policy and Maidan Ukraine’s War Crimes. http:/gordonhahn.com/2015/08/05/america’s-ukraine-policy-and-maidan-ukraine’s-war-crimes/#_finref3
- [9] See Richard Sakwa – Frontline Ukraine – passim. And before him by J.A.Schumpeter: He contended that in ancient Egypt ‘a class of professional soldiers’ formed in a war against a foreign tribe ‘the Hyksos’ persisted even when those wars were over. This military caste ‘created by wars that required it, now the organization created the wars it required.’ A pithy summary of NATO and the MIC perhaps.
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