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Jan. 26, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
33:07
Antifa and the Black Bloc Explained
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So there appears to be a lot of confusion over what anti-far and anarchism is, so I'm going to try and clear some of that up.
You're probably aware of the protests and riots following Donald Trump's inauguration, as captured by Rebel Media and Lauren Southern here.
This is insane.
This is what Antifa is.
This is what the anti-Trump movement is.
Oh my god, the rock just flew by.
There are rocks flying off.
Lauren's right to say that that's what Antifa is, but she's wrong to characterise the entire anti-Trump movement that way.
But classifying this as simply an anarchist protest is also inaccurate, because there's a lot going on here that really needs to be explained.
And yes, these are the people who decided to assault Richard Spencer.
To be honest, like this is where we are.
I've given conferences for ages and we'll usually expect some protestors, they'll do silly string or something like that.
We've entered this new world where the leftist protestors, no, I'm not a neo-Nazi.
We like black people!
Neo-Nazis don't love me, they kind of hate me, actually.
Are you like the Himmer version of the Neo-Nazis?
It's Pepe's become kind of a symbol.
Now you're probably thinking one of the few things there.
You might be a regressive leftist who is thrilled that someone who claims they're not a neo-Nazi got punched for being a neo-Nazi, and I don't know whether Spencer is a neo-Nazi or not.
If you're the sort of person who cares about democracy and human decency, you're probably thinking, there is never an acceptable time to punch one's political opponent when they are not engaged in violence themselves.
But if you're anything like me, you're thinking, what kind of noodly armed pussy can't even get a man to the ground with a sucker punch?
A running sucker punch.
But trust me, this will become self-evident later on.
Anyway, calling these people anarchists is simply just inaccurate.
There are many different kinds of anarchists and they're all stupid and wrong.
You'll notice how all these protesters are dressed in black with their faces covered and walking in close formation, and they're flying a specific kind of flag.
And I know what you're thinking.
Isn't a flag a trapping of statehood?
I mean, what are they going to have at national anthem borders next?
And you're right, they're idiots.
But let's have a look at exactly who these anarchists are.
The flag featured at the protest was that of the anarcho-communists or the anarcho-syndicalists.
Now I actually believe that theirs was the anarcho-communist, as the black is on top of the red, whereas with anarcho-syndicalists, the red is on top of the black.
The difference between the two philosophies is basically how revolutionary they are.
Essentially, anarcho-syndicalists seek to gain control of the means of production from within capitalist society, whereas anarcho-communists seek to overthrow capitalist society and implement the communist utopia, which at the end of it, despite common misconceptions, wouldn't have a government.
So the desired end goal of communism is rather anarchist in nature, and totally unrealistic.
Anarcho-communists seek to collectivize private property and remove the government entirely.
There are of course many other kinds of anarchists.
The second most common kind of anarchist is the anarcho-capitalist.
The anarcho-capitalists are actually more delusional than the anarcho-communists, because at least the anarcho-communists accept that in the future anarchist utopia nobody will own any private property, whereas the anarcho-capitalists seem to think they will.
I've got some bad news for you, Ancaps.
You won't.
The anarcho-capitalists fail to distinguish between ownership and occupation.
As it stands now, ownership and occupation are different.
You do not have to occupy something to own it.
You can leave, you can go on holiday, you can go out to work, and you can be certain that your property will still be intact by the time you return, because the government will enforce your property rights whether you are there or not, and people know that they are not supposed to take property that does not belong to them.
According to anarcho-capitalists, you would have to pay someone to protect your property for you while you were away, or you would have to simply reside in it permanently.
It's important to distinguish between the two because they are both kinds of anarchists, but they absolutely despise each other.
And from my own personal experience, I find the anarcho-capitalists far less insufferable.
The anarcho-capitalists have different principles to the anarcho-communists, one of them being the non-aggression principle, and this is the reason that we won't find anarcho-capitalists rampaging through the streets in gangs smashing up private property.
There are of course many other kinds of anarchists, but these aren't really politically active, and you're unlikely to see these people marching in the streets with their own favourite flags.
But here's a selection of them, just so you know.
The black and green flag is the flag of the anarcho-primitivists, who are exactly as they sound.
They wish to abandon the means of production altogether and for humanity to return to the wilderness, because hierarchy and government come from civilization itself, and so it is civilisation that must be abandoned.
I'm not actually sure what's stopping them from simply disappearing into the woods on their own, but for some reason they decide that they need to drag the rest of us with them.
The purple and black flag is the flag of the anarcho-feminists, who, you guessed it, believe that hierarchy and structure and civilization are themselves patriarchy, and of course, must be torn down.
This is not wildly different from queer anarchism, which is the pink and black flag.
They believe that the heteronormative patriarchy is oppressing queer people everywhere, and therefore this hierarchy is illegitimate and must be torn down as well.
And finally, the white and black flag is the flag of the anarcho-French.
I mean, the anarcho-pacifists.
These are the most delusional kind of anarchists, and they will last the shortest amount of time when the revolution comes.
Not that the anarcho-pacifists will ever find themselves leading a revolution, because they are fundamentally opposed to all kinds of violence, despite the fact that they consider themselves to be the victims of violence from the mere existence of the state.
Put simply, every variant of anarchism will not happen, because for human beings to live in close proximity to one another, they need governance.
They need to have a social contract.
If you'd like to learn more about the social contract, and I suggest you do, you will want to read Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treaties, and Rousseau's The Social Contract.
These will explain to you precisely why human beings need a government, and what happens when you don't have one.
Of these works of political philosophy, Leviathan is the earliest and most long-winded, and I hate to say it, but the most obsolete.
Very little of Leviathan is actually relevant today, but the parts that are relevant are very good.
Of Locke's two treatises, the second treatise is Locke's normative view of government, but the first is actually a real pleasure to read, because it's effectively a YouTube response video, in book format, to Sir Robert Filmer who is arguing that the seat of authority and power comes from the father, patriarchy, and Locke just, it's almost funny the way he just rips it apart and exposes the fallacious thinking involved.
The easiest to read is Rousseau's social contract, and it's also the shortest.
Rousseau's language is easily the most digestible, but it's much more continental and, frankly, horrifically collectivist.
A government exists to enforce the social contract, and the social contract is an unwritten agreement that exists in everyone's heads because they are aware that if they break laws, there will be punishments for breaking these laws.
And if you want to see what it looks like when this social contract is dissolved, you can simply look at any police strike.
For example, the Montreal police strike of 1969.
Quote: There were many bank robberies, much looting in central Montreal.
A gun store was ransacked, and Molotov cocktails were thrown.
Doubtless, there were uncounted scores of common crimes that went unanswered.
One of the chief street battles that took place was between members and supporters of the taxi liberation movement, who took their struggle to the headquarters of the Murray Hill Company.
The latter had been granted an exclusive and financially valuable contract to transport airline passengers at Doval Airport, thus eliminating an important taxi driver's take.
A general state of anarchy ensued, as local and provincial leaders, as well as the media, categorized it.
Two people were killed, including a provincial police officer.
There was other gunfire and a couple of million dollars destruction resulted from the downtown riot.
Put simply, when people believe that they are not under the control of an authority, they do whatever the hell they like, even at the expense of other people.
This is why anarchy will never, ever work, and anyone who claims to be an anarchist of any stripe is just simply deeply misinformed.
So, this is Antifar, a loose association of anarcho-communists, and what you see here is a tactic they use called the Black Block.
You can find information on Antifar from many different sources, but the best ones are always ones with Antifar sympathies, and these will always be highly regressive.
There is a great deal of confused overlap between the regressive left and the anarchist communists who make up Antifar.
They don't necessarily argue for the same things, but they think that they do.
Both mindsets are very concerned with oppression, structural oppression, structural, intersectional oppression.
They just have different solutions for these.
The average social justice warrior wants to control people.
They want to control the government.
They want to control the institutions of society.
The average anarcho-communist wants to tear these all down and have consensus-based organizations.
This is from Regressive Outlet The Nation.
Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer got punched, and you can thank the Black Block.
Spencer, who states that America belongs to white men, was in the midst of telling an Australian TV crew in DC that he is not a neo-Nazi while pointing to his neo-Nazi Pepe the Frog label pin.
I just want to point out that Pepe the Frog is not a neo-Nazi symbol, but anyway.
A black cloud figure then jumps into frame, Deus Ex Machiner, with a perfectly placed right hook to Spencer's face.
The alt-right poster boy stumbles away, and his anonymous attacker bounds out of sight in an instant.
I don't know who threw the punch, but I know by his unofficial uniform that it was a member of our black bloc that day.
And anyone enjoying the Nazi bashing clip, and many are, should know that they are watching anti-fascist bloc tactics par excellence, pure kinetic beauty.
And if you want to thank Spencer's puncher, thank the Black Bloc.
This is effectively a domestic terrorist organisation, who commit acts of violence against undeserving targets for their own political purposes.
The Black Bloc is not a group, but an anarchist tactic.
Marching as a confrontational united force, uniformed in black and anonymized for security.
Once deployed, the tactic has an alchemical quality, turning into a temporary object, the Black Bloc.
On Friday, the bloc I joined in DC numbered well over 500, the largest of its kind since the anti-war protests of a decade prior.
As I wrote in advance of the inauguration, if we recognize fascism in Trump's attendance, our response must be anti-fascist in nature.
This is a ridiculous thing to say.
If we recognize the fascism in Trump's ascendance, our response must be communist in nature, is what they are saying.
It's like saying, if we recognize the Christian nature of the Pope, our response must be Islamic.
The history of anti-fascist action is not one of polite protest nor failed appeals to respond to reasoned debate with racists, but direct aggressive confrontation.
And this of course reveals to us the problem with simply declaring people you don't like to be fascists.
And attacking fascists comes with a pre-packaged justification to simply attack them for their mere existence.
And again, I really think it's worth making the point that the J20 anti-FAR protests were very different to the Women's March protests, and there's probably very little overlap between them.
The Women's March was enormous, Anti-Far is actually quite tiny.
Although, as you can see from this passage here, the Anti-Far people are very sympathetic to the Women's March.
They say, not everyone can participate in a black block.
Those with vulnerable immigration status or arrest records, or good reason to fear police repression because of the colour of their skin, often don't participate in activities where the risk of arrest is high.
Friday's block was by no means all white, but it was predominantly white.
If bearers of white privilege can do one thing, it's put ourselves on the line and take risks where others can't.
This obviously provokes the question, why bother covering yourselves up at all?
If you're so confident in your white privilege, what's the point?
Because when you have a group of people clad head to toe in black with face coverings and coverings over their entire bodies, you can't tell if they have white privilege or not.
And when the police broke up these black blocks, they simply mass arrested everyone involved.
And as you can see by the very nature of this article, many of the left-wing journalists/slash activists who cover this in gonzo fashion are more than happy to put themselves within the block itself and take part in the bloc's actions, which is precisely why the police arrested journalists.
Of course, other radical left-wing publications such as The Guardian will leave this out and simply state that four more journalists get felony charges after covering the inauguration arrest, deliberately implying that these journalists were not part of the block that they were covering.
Four more journalists have been charged with felonies after being arrested while covering the unrest around Donald Trump's inauguration, meaning that at least six media workers are facing up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine if convicted.
A documentary producer, a photojournalist, a live streamer, and a freelance reporter were each charged with the most serious level of offence under Washington DC's law against rioting, after being caught up in the police action against demonstrators.
This is of course being misinterpreted by activists on social media as Donald Trump's police crackdown against journalists.
This is of course total nonsense.
As award-winning journalist Tim Poole points out on Twitter when he tweets out the Guardian article and says, The article fails to mention that two NBC reporters and I were released without charge shortly after being arrested, because Tim Poole and the NBC reporters were not part of the black bloc.
The best information on Antifar and their black bloc tactics comes from Occupy Wall Street, who had particular problems with them during the Occupy protests.
Unmasking the Black Bloc, who they are, what they do, and how they work.
Journalist Chris Hedges says, The black bloc anarchists who have been active on the streets of Oakland and other cities are the cancer of the Occupy movement.
Black blocs are ad hoc assemblages of individuals or affinity groups that last for the duration of a march or rally, in which the members retain their anonymity via head-to-toe black clothing.
While there may be a use of force, more often than not they are content to protest peacefully, with the main objective being to embody within a demonstration a radical critique of the economic and political system.
A black bloc can be one person or thousands.
It should be noted that a black bloc isn't a group, but rather a tactic to allow for radicals to engage in direct action without fear of arrest.
While many black blockers are anarchist, not all of them are.
While this is undoubtedly true, it's not unfair to characterize this as an anarchist tactic, because, as they say, most of them are anarchists.
Black blocs came out of the autonomous movement in Germany in the 1980s, specifically West Germany, where radical feminists had a profound effect on the automen, injecting the movement with a more anarchist spirit than was the case elsewhere in Western Europe.
The automen expressed their politics via rent strikes and reappropriating hundreds of buildings, which were turned into squats, that doubled as spaces for political activity.
The first time a black bloc made a major move in North America was during a January 1991 rally against the Persian Gulf War, where the World Bank building was targeted.
Black bloc tactics were also used by the militant anti-racist group Anti-Racist Action, which focuses directly on confronting neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
It should be noted that the black blocs, at least in the US and Europe, are generally overwhelmingly white and male.
However, there is some diversity.
In a communique published days after the demonstrations against the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Mary Black, a pseudonym for a protester who took part in the protests, noted that most of the people she knew who used the black block tactics have day jobs working for non-profits.
Some are school teachers, labour organisers or students.
Some didn't have full-time jobs but spend most of their time working for change in their communities.
These are thinking, caring folks who, if they did not have radical politicals and social agendas, would be compared with nuns, monks and others who live their lives in service.
And this explains the ineffectiveness of their physical violence against people like Richard Spencer.
These people are soft, presumably middle class, and totally unused to any kind of violence.
These are not like football hooligans that we see on the streets of British cities during a major match.
These are in fact people LARPing as revolutionaries.
Dupois Derry himself stated in interviews that he has had with black blockers, many had been involved in the social sciences, and that in a number of cases their research projects dealt with the political significance and consequences of demonstrations and direct actions, suggesting that their political involvement was grounded in serious political thinking.
Thus, those who involve themselves in black block tactics are not necessarily people who are at protests solely to break things, although such types of people do come in and cause problems.
Antifar and their black block tactics are effectively the expression of the radical political philosophies being cooked up in the social science courses in academia.
They aren't universal and you can't blame anyone specifically for this, but this is something that is happening and we have to be aware of it.
Black bloc groups attempt to function in a horizontal manner, with each person having an equal say in deliberating issues where the goal is consensus rather than voting.
In order to do this, black blockers form affinity groups, which are groups generally composed of between half a dozen and several dozen individuals whose affinity results from ties that bind them, such as belonging to the same school, workplace, or political organisation.
By having previous ties to one another, members and affinity groups are able to coordinate much easier.
Black blocs meet to plan and organise before the event, but also during protests as well.
One black blocker who took part in protests in the G8 summit in 2003 noted in her reflection of the events: I found it extraordinary that we could hold delegates' meetings right in the middle of the blocking action.
There were barricades, fires had been lit, and the police were slinging a lot of tear gas.
And still, a meeting was called with someone yelling, Meeting in 10 minutes near the road sign.
The meeting took place barely a few hundred meters from where the police stood, and it allowed us to decide on our course of action.
The police officers see you as a crowd and assume that you're going to act like a crowd.
The affinity group model disrupts that dynamic.
You don't act like a crowd anymore, but like a rational being.
With regards to property damage, for black blockers, the target is the message.
Targets are often chosen for their symbolic value.
On principle, black blocks do not strike community centres, public libraries, the offices of women's committees, or even small independent businesses.
While this may be true generally, the use of property destruction by some black blockers can cause problems, such as can be seen in the recent Berkeley protests, where people were protesting the death of Eric Garner and individuals' caymans broke the windows of a number of banks.
This is deeply problematic, as it took the attention off Eric the death of Eric Garner and the larger issues surrounding police brutality against the black community and put the attention on banks.
Actions such as these can potentially create a space for the police to justify a crackdown on all protesters.
However, if you're an anarcho-communist, anti-FAR protester, it's very difficult to see the banks as anything other than cathedrals of capitalism, and I guess the desire to smash them just kind of overtakes you.
The fetishization of property destruction is a problem with the black bloc.
I think it's a problem with the anarcho-communists and anti-FAR in general, to be honest.
As in some cases, violent direct action becomes a means for a would-be militant to affirm their political identity in the eyes of other militants.
It's a form of virtue signalling.
This makes it very tempting for that person to look down on and exclude those who do not equate radicalism with violence.
And yet, not all black blockers engage in this fetishization and are aware of the dangers, such as with a participant of the Quebec City Black Blocks who stated, I have no patience for dogmatic pacifism, but there is also dogmatic violence, which sees violence as the only and only means to wage the struggle.
The protester Sofien noted, We don't advocate violence.
It's not a program, because you can easily acquire a taste for violence.
You get used to it.
But when it comes to doing militant work, not many people show up.
Simply put, the black block is an excuse for violence, and the people who want an excuse for violence will join it and commit it, in the knowledge that they have their anonymity and safety in numbers.
And of course, the black blocks are indeed problematic.
Though the debate surrounding property violence is the largest and loudest of all, there are other problems within black blocs, such as sexism and accusations of alienating the working class.
With regards to sexism, many critics of black blocs argue that militant direct action partakes of a macho mystique that does not encourage women to join in, and that expressing one's anger through destruction simply confirms and amplifies aggressive masculinity.
Furthermore, the sexual division of labour is often reproduced, with a woman who took part in a number of black blocks in 2012 Quebec student strike saying that there was a number of women who often did the shopping when fabric was needed to make the flags and banners.
How patriarchal.
Dupree Derry noted that the situation hadn't changed, writing that more than a decade earlier, during a meeting to prepare a black bloc in Montreal, the men ended up in the backyard of an apartment honing their slingshot skills while the women were in the kitchen making Molotov cocktails.
My that is problematic.
Thus, masculinity was not only reproduced in many black bloc circles, but also creates a space that rejects the participation of women and devalues their labour, and thus they're important to the movement.
Some argue that black blocs alienate the working class with their clothing and lifestyle choices which are associated with the anarchist counterculture.
While many may argue that there are those in the working class who support and take part in the black blocs, it should be noted that these are not fully representative of the working class.
There is a lack of people of colour and women, and so the black blocs are more representative of the young white working class.
But even then, if they're people who are interested in the social sciences, let's be honest, these are not representative of the working class.
And if you watch any kind of footage, which we will in a minute, you'll see that these kids are not working class.
Just because these people are anarchists doesn't mean they aren't also organising, because as we've already seen, they are.
And there are also things like the Resistance Manual Home Wiki, where you can see the Trump GOP policy agenda here.
Obamacare, immigration, mass incarceration, housing and infrastructure, LGBTQ equality, the Muslim Ban Registry, Climate and Environment, Policing, Voting Rights, Tax Cuts for the Wealthy, Women's Rights and Reproductive Justice, Educational Justice, Consumer Protections, Workers' Rights, and Foreign Policy and Global Security.
I'll leave it to you to imagine what an anarchist foreign policy looks like.
As we've seen in recent months, Antifar have become very active and very militant, going out onto the streets and bullying and harassing and assaulting people, as well as as much violent looting and property destruction as they're capable of.
One of the most viral examples from the J20 protests at the Trump inauguration was this limousine, which was smashed up by Antifar and then set on fire.
And this is a perfect example of the problem with vigilante justice, as the limo that was torched in the DC protests belonged to a Muslim immigrant and will cost him $70,000 in damage.
Mohamed Ashraf, the owner of Nationwide Chauffeur Services, said, I have a different point of view.
I do not agree with many of the things he said, but that still does not give me the right to go and affect someone's livelihood.
He believed these protests and this violence was completely counterproductive.
And he's correct.
These people have in no way ensured that Muslims in America feel safe and secure, they have in fact done the opposite.
There are also other examples, such as an antifar writer being beaten up by Muslims while they were shouting filthy white.
Writer Ghislaine Gilberti and his son were savagely attacked on Saturday by a group of men shouting filthy white, seemingly Islamists enraged by one of his novels, Police in France have heard.
Mr. Gilbert and his 12-year-old son were attacked in Belfort, France, on Saturday following harassment and attempted break-ins.
Though an active anti-fascist, the writer and his family received death threats from Salafists, displeased that the prologue title of the novelist's bestseller is Jihad.
Mr. Gilberti said that he received blows to his back before being called a filthy white by four men aged between 20 and 30 years who held him down while attacking.
The author reported the men also kicked his 12-year-old son in the head and stomach, shouting, it's the same price for you, and we don't forgive, we don't forget, at his 11-year-old daughter who was also present.
And let's be honest, she's quite lucky to have had nothing done to her.
The thriller novelist lost consciousness during the beating and following the attack will again request full police protection.
Oh, the irony!
There was also an incident of an anti-far protester being shot at a Milo protest at a university where he was giving a speech.
No details about any confrontation between him and the critically wounded man were available at the time, but one of the law enforcement officials said that the man who fired the gun claimed he had been assaulted before shooting the other man, whom he believed to be some type of white supremacist.
This led many people, myself included, to mistakenly believe that this was anti-far on anti-far violence.
Later updates showed that this was actually an act of self-defense by one of Milo Yiannopoulos' fans.
The shooter whom the Seattle Times would not name because he has not been charged with a crime, sent a Facebook message about an hour before the shooting to Yiannopoulos, complaining that he'd been sucker punched and someone had stolen his Make America Great Again hat.
And his Facebook page indicates that he supports Trump, Yiannopoulos, and the NRA.
So this was in fact an example of an anti-fascist protester attacking one of Milo's fans and being shot for his troubles.
And the evil fascist police wouldn't even arrest the man because self-defense is not illegal.
And finally there was another example that was caught on very grainy footage from the J20 protests of anti-farm members blocking just a guy who's trying to get to his job.
That's what happens when a bunch of soft mollycoddled middle-class students meet the working class and get in their fucking way because of some stupid metaphysical idea that really happens to go counter to that guy's personal needs.
which is in his mind, getting to work.
He doesn't take their shit and punches one of them out.
And of course, what did the antifar protesters?
The destroy capitalism, destroy hierarchy, get rid of authority, the police are racist.
What did these people do?
But you shouldn't arrest that guy for defending a woman being assaulted by a grown-ass man.
That's right.
Suddenly they want the police to arrest a grown-ass man.
I mean, they didn't even check his personal pronouns.
And I just want to point out, you can see that she hit him first.
B0, I'm more than happy to defer this to the jury of public opinion, with Judge Whoopi Goldberg presiding.
Because I know I'm going to catch a lot of hell, and I don't care.
But you have to teach women.
Do not live with this idea that men have the chivalry thing still with them.
Don't assume that that's still in place.
So don't be surprised if you hit a man and he hits you back.
You don't hit him.
You hit somebody, they hit you back.
Don't be surprised.
So when you're a member of Antifar and you go out to protest against the fascism and tyranny of Donald Trump, you're head to toe in black, you've joined your black bloc, you've formed a barricade and you're interrupting and assaulting members of the public and the fascist police won't even arrest him for self-defense, what do you need to do?
You need to try and drum up a little anti-fascist riots and protest.
It's not the most cringy thing in the world or anything.
Show me what a police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what a police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what a police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what a police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what a police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what the police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what the police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Show me what a police state looks like!
This is what a police state looks like!
Yeah, that kind of fizzled out pretty quickly.
But here's the deal with Antifar: They're weak.
They're pathetic, they're cowardly, and they're pointless.
They're going to get nothing done other than a bit of property damage and assaulting random civilians.
They are awful.
They are, in fact, the very fascists they claim to be protesting about.
They are basically mobs of communists declaring everyone they don't like to be fascists and then using that as a justification to attack them.
And the regressive media all across the internet is applauding them.
This has to be talked down before they get themselves in trouble.
Usually with the police, but with anyone who is prepared to raise their fists in return, because as I've said repeatedly, and I'm sure I will say again, these people are weak.
They're pusilanimous.
They are not in any way physical or physically minded.
They are usually bookish, amateurish sociology students LARPing their fantasies of anarchism.
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