The Sarmatian Review

Alex Kurczaba

East Central Europe and Multiculturalism in the American Academy1

The restoration of East Central Europe as one of Europe's distinctive regions is a hallmark of the post-Cold War period. The demise of communism, the transition to democracy, the restoration of market economies, the expansion of NATO, the resurgence of the Polish economy, the enormous influence of the Polish Pope all of these developments have brought attention to East Central Europe, particularly to Poland. Given the pace and intensity of change, the peaceful nature of East Central Europe's postcolonial transformation is remarkable, contrasting sharply with the violence in the Balkans. Ewa M. Thompson has written extensively on the representation of East Central Europe in the media and the academy. Especially pertinent are her essays "Pariahs and Favorites in East Central Europe" and "Russophilia."2 In the first of these, Professor Thompson observes: '... to speak with minimal competence about that part of the world requires making a distinction between East Central Europe (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia), the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, partly Greece), and the post-Soviet states of Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. East Central Europe is as different from the Balkans as Canada is from Argentina.' (22)

In the United States, there are several hundred thousand Polish American college alumni, thousands of MDs and lawyers. Did it ever occur to these alumni to call, write, speak up, encourage, cajole the administrations of their Alma Maters in favor of full time tenure track positions in Polish?

This contrast has not been lost on American commentators. In his book, The Next American Nation, Michael Lind considers the lessons of Poland: "After the third partition of Poland...no Polish state existed until one was reestablished in 1919....Nevertheless, the Polish nation continued to exist for a century and a quarter. By contrast, with the breakup of the Yugoslav state there no longer is any group that can be called a Yugoslav people....America is more like Poland than Yugoslavia. There is an American nation which, like the Polish people, would continue to exist, even if the American nation-state, the United States of America, were wiped off the map."3

East Central Europe as a postcolonial entity presents a fertile terrain for sociologists, political scientists, economists, and historians to test the premises and principles of postcolonial theories. One topic for investigation is an explanation of the sources and reasons for the pacific nature of East Central Europe's post-Cold War transformation. Is there something in the cultures of the region that might account for its nonviolent emancipation from totalitarian rule? Whatever the answers, compelling cases have been made for approaching East Central Europe as a sui generis historical region deserving its own home base in the academy. Those who have made this case include Oskar Halecki, R.R. Palmer (The Age of the Democratic Revolution), George H. Williams (The Radical Reformation, The Polish Brethren), Piotr Wandycz (The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe), and Norman Davies (God's Playground: A History of Poland; Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland; Europe: A History). Columbia University's longstanding Institute on East Central Europe testifies to the feasibility of such academic units as does Rice University's Central Europe Study Group.

Given the region's considerable weight, the question arises: what impact has the reemergence of East Central Europe exerted on the American academy? How has the academy responded to this reemergence? What has been done to offer American college students the chance to acquaint themselves with the vicissitudes of over 80 million people inhabiting one of the most sensitive regions on the globe? To answer these questions, a brief reconnaissance of the academy is in order.

For two decades, a strident debate on the curriculum has preoccupied American universities. This debate often centers on the issue of multiculturalism. The term 'multiculturalism' requires clarification. An innocent observer say, a student entering college or parents footing tuition bills assumes that the word means what it says, that 'multiculturalism' refers to the study of foreign cultures, say Italian, Portuguese, French, and Irish; or Tibetan, Tatar, and Mongolian; or Egyptian, Ethiopian, Algerian, and Syrian; or Zambian, Somalian, and Liberian; or Bolivian, Ecuadoran, Chilean, Peruvian, Guatemalan, Haitian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Salvadoran; or the cultures of Madagascar or Mozambique; or Suriname, Sierra Leone, North Korea, and Trinidad and Tobago; or, in the case of Central Europe: German, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Polish.

But the innocent observer would be wrong, for this is not the way in which multiculturalism is understood in the academy today. 'Multiculturalism,' as used by its advocates, does not refer to world cultures as objects of study available to students on a level playing field. Rather, in the academy, 'multiculturalism' and 'cultural diversity' are code words for a view of the world driven by a peculiar view of history. According to this view, history is a tale perennially pitting victims against their victimizers and, so the tale goes, Europeans are history's incorrigible victimizers and all non-Europeans their victims. A. Owen Aldridge provides a lucid survey and critique of multiculturalism in his essay "Multiculturalism, or Culture's Last Stand?"4 Aldridge thus depicts multiculturalism's ideology: '...all history must be based on the theory of majorities seeking to impose their will upon minorities.' (34) Further, the only culture worth teaching is 'culture produced by and intended for others than dead white European males and disseminated in the interest of groups who have in the past been oppressed or discriminated against.'

Although my examples are drawn from the University of Illinois at Chicago, my comments are directed not at a particular institution but at the academy's prevailing mind set. The victimization view of the world is manifested in a series of ventures duly budgeted with state funds. These include a "Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women," a "Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Latinos," and a "Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals." Initiatives to alleviate the suffering of the oppressed are, of course, laudable. Unfortunately, the sensitivity underpinning such undertakings is highly selective. Laudable as they are, the number of committees on the status of oppressed humans is far too small. One looks in vain for a "Committee on the Status of the Transgendered," a "Committee on the Status of Closet Heterosexuals," a "Committee on the Status of Appalachians," a "Committee on the Status of Former Captive Nations," and a "Committee on the Status of Left-Handed Catholics."

Despite the unresponsiveness of university administrations nationwide, Polish programs thrive wherever they are instituted.

This last category deserves comment. Left-handed Catholics are doubly victimized: first, because the world, as we know, is created for the right-handed; secondly, as Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., remarked, because prejudice against the Catholic Church is the deepest bias in the history of the American people. Given the size of America's Catholic community and the history of anti-Catholicism in this country, one is compelled to ask: how many of our public universities feature Programs in Catholic Studies? As noted above, according to multicultist mantra: because Europeans exhibit a propensity for doing bad things, Europe is excluded as an approved object of study in favor of the rest of the world. Thus, students are required to choose a third world culture, a subculture, or a non-Western and non-European culture. In the American academy today, Fiji and Kiribati get the academy's stamp of approval, while Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, and Hungarian do not.

At the University of Illinois at Chicago, where enrollments in Polish culture courses are high, the multiculturalists have decided to do something about it. To diminish interest in this politically incorrect subject, they have reached a remarkable conclusion: 'Poles and Lithuanians are... not usually thought of as disadvantaged groups....' 5 This extraordinary insight suggests the scope of the challenge facing those engaged in the study of East Central Europe at universities today. The difference between the University of Illinois at Chicago and other institutions of higher education is that the others think alike but are seldom compelled to say so. Clearly, multiculturalism has little to do with teaching geography, general history, the history of ideas, or the history of values, the history of institutions, that is, with teaching culture in the humanist sense of the term. Truth be told, multiculturalism is a peculiar postmodern attempt at mental engineering, a mantra which Samuel P. Huntington, among others, sees as a factor contributing to the fragmentation of an American national identity. 'The distintegrative effects of the end of the Cold War have been reinforced by the interaction of two trends in American society: changes in the scope and sources of immigration and the rise of the cult of multiculturalism.'6 The anti-Europe agenda of multiculturalism is absurd on its face. But for the sake of discussion let me mention two reasons why it is absurd. First, like it or not, Europe is important. Thomas Fleming observes: 'Anglo-American literature ... does not rival the literatures of Greece and Rome, France and Italy, and taken by itself American culture cannot bear comparison with, say, its Irish and Polish rivals.'7 Non-European intellectuals themselves testify to the importance of European culture and civilization. The Nigerian writer and 1986 Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, recalls reading Sophocles in English translation as a boy in colonial Nigeria and insists that he felt as close to the Athens of the fifth century B.C. as an English schoolboy would have felt. Soyinka's translation-adaptation of one of the great books of Western Culture, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, testifies to his success in seamlessly integrating Europe's cultural legacy with his own. One can only nod in agreement with the Nigerian playwright's assertion: '...first and foremost I wear the cap of a human being.'8 Unlike the gurus of multiculturalism, Soyinka would doubtless see the struggles for liberation of Poles and Africans as equally praiseworthy.9

Second, at a time when head counts make or break academic programs, it makes no sense to privilege Kiribati and Fiji while excluding Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic countries. Let us look at demographic data. In the 1990 Census 9,366,106 respondents gave Polish as their first ancestry. If we add to this total those who gave Czech (including Czechoslovak), Hungarian, and Lithuanian as first ancestry, we get a total of 13,375,750 which surpasses the total number of Asians and Pacific Islanders, an artificial racial category sanctioned by the federal government. The 1990 Census listed 16,000 Fijians. No data was given on natives of Kiribati or their descendants. My point is this: one is much more likely to stumble upon an American college student of Polish or Czech or Hungarian or Lithuanian ancestry than on a Fijian. And when we consider Central Europe as a whole, then the nearly 58 million (57,985,595) Americans who listed German as their first ancestry would make the multiculturalist position as outlandish as the space station Mir.

By virtue of population, geography, acuity of historical experience, cultural continuity, and influence on neighboring countries, Poland is the lynchpin of East Central Europe and thus a proper object of study by any measure. One cannot understand the twentieth century without understanding Europe, nor Europe without understanding Central Europe, nor Central Europe without understanding Poland. In this regard, the pivotal status of the Polish Question, the twentieth century differs little from the nineteenth. The worldwide population of Poles is 51 million.10 Of these, 13 million live outside Poland, the bulk in the United States. The 1990 U.S. census lists Poles as the ninth largest ancestry group in the U.S. 723,483 Americans listed Polish as a foreign language spoken at home; by comparison, Russian was listed by 241,798 Americans. Poles constitute the third largest ancestry group in the state of Wisconsin. Polish is in second place as a foreign language spoken in Illinois households. In the period 1980-1990 the number of Illinois residents of Polish ancestry grew to 962,827, an increase of 7.9%, while the total population of Illinois grew only .03%. Since 1989, the Chicago Public Schools have seen a 415% increase in the number of Polish children enrolled in their English Proficiency program (see the WebPage of Chicago's Polish American Association).

What has been the effect of these demographics on Polish studies at state universities? Consider the Polish program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

ENROLLMENTS IN POLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE COURSES

Year

Number of Students Enrolled in Polish

1993-94

165

1994-95

236

1995-96

335

1996-97

402

COMPARISON OF ENROLLMENTS IN CULTURE COURSES AT 100-LEVEL AT UIC-FALL 1995
Polish 115 (Introduction to Polish Culture): 99
African American 105 (Introduction to African American Culture): 55
Classics 100 (Greek Civilization): 53
Latin American 102 (Introduction to U.S. Latino Cultural Studies): 34
Russian 116 (Russian Culture in the Soviet Period): 32
Slavic 115 (Serbian Culture): 32
English 108 (British Literature and Culture): 29
Slavic 116 (Old Slavic and Ukrainian Folklore and Mythology): 18

POLISH PROGRAM AT UIC - DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC AND BALTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES - ENROLLMENTS 1993-1997

Year

Enrollment

Percent Increase

1993-94

165

 

1994-95

236

43%

1995-96

335

103%

1996-97

402

147%

RUSSIAN PROGRAM AT UIC - DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC AND BALTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES - ENROLLMENTS 1993-1997

Year

Enrollment

Percent Increase

1993-94

268

 

1994-95

228

-14.9%

1995-96

204

-23.9%

1996-97

252

-6%

RATIO OF STUDENTS TO TENURE TRACK FACULTY - SPRING 1994
Polish 38:1 Russian 6:1

DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC AND BALTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES - TOTAL ENROLLMENTS IN FALL 1997
Lithuanian 44
Polish 245
Russian 174
Serbian and Ukrainian 60

DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC AND BALTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES - TOTAL ENROLLMENTS IN FALL 1996-SPRING 1997
Lithuanian: 51 and 12
Polish: 242 and 160
Russian: 125 and 127
Serbian & Ukrainian: 64 and 36

In each of the eight semesters in the period 1993-1997 enrollment in Polish language, literature, and culture classes increased significantly. From 1993-94 to 1995-97, enrollment in Polish more than doubled (147% increase). Enrollment in "Introduction to Polish Cinema" nearly tripled (from 10 to 28 students) between Fall 1993 and Fall 1995. Enrollment in "Introduction to Polish Culture" doubled between 1994-95 and 1995-96. In both 1994-95 and 1995-96, this Polish culture course posted the highest enrollments of all freshmen level Cultural Diversity courses in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. At the graduate level enrollment in courses in Polish language and literature nearly tripled between 1993-94 and 1995-96 (from 8 to 23 students).

What has been the university administration's response to the growth in Polish at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois? The Bachelor's Program in the Teaching of Polish was dropped (the B.A. in the Teaching of Russian was not). Russian is offered in the summer session, Polish is not. Russian faculty are hired without subjection to an English competency test. Polish faculty are subjected to an English competency test. The Polish program has one tenured faculty member at the level of assistant, associate, or full professor, Russian has four. The student-teacher ratio in Polish is among the most unfavorable in the humanities departments, the ratio in Russian among the most favorable. Russian is among the costliest programs; the opposite is true of Polish.

Despite the unresponsiveness of university administrations nationwide, Polish programs thrive wherever they are instituted. Polish culture has been offered at DePaul University's School for New Learning summer sessions for the past three years. It is one of the best enrolled classes there. Polish language has been taught at DePaul by a visiting instructor from Poland for the past three years under a program of the Kosciuszko Foundation. It is clear that there is sufficient interest in Polish at DePaul to sustain a full time tenure-track faculty member in Polish. Polish language and literature have been taught at Loyola University in Chicago for many years by a part- time instructor. Student interest in Polish at Loyola has been proven over time: Loyola can sustain a full time tenure-track faculty member in Polish. Polish language was introduced this year at St. Xavier University, Chicago's oldest institution of higher education. Polish enrollment in the second semester at St. Xavier is higher than French. A Polish minor is being considered. It is clear St. Xavier can sustain a full time tenure-track faculty member in Polish.

Now let's look at the issue from another angle: Polish enrollment at Northwestern University is zero. Northwestern students who wish to study Polish are sent to the University of Illinois at Chicago. When Northwestern students expressed a desire for a course on Polish history, a part time visiting appointment in Polish history was made on a one-time, ad hoc basis. The Polish enrollment at Northeastern Illinois University is zero. The Polish enrollment at Northern Illinois University is zero. The Polish enrollment at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois (which nine years after the fall of the Berlin Wall still retains its "Russian and Eastern European Center") is minimal. Finally, the Polish enrollment at the University of Illinois at Chicago in summer sessions is zero.

I mention this because it is not true that a large Polish population automatically guarantees large Polish enrollments. To have large enrollments in Polish or any enrollments in Polish, there must first be Polish courses in place for students to enroll in. In other words, Polish programs must be established, funded, and nurtured. As the late Aloysius Mazewski, President of the Polish National Alliance, put it: 'The only reason there is a Polish program at your university is because somebody insisted on having it there.'

There are two additional factors contributing to the underdevelopment of Polish studies. One of these is the context in which Polish is housed in the academy: the Slavic department and its invariable pro-Russian bias. The second is the support or lack thereof given Polish programs by the Polish American community.

In The Next American Nation, Michael Lind says:11 'Suppose that the federal government created a category of citizens of eastern European descent called Slavics, and made them eligible for affirmative action benefits. Soon...many Americans of partial Polish, Russian, Czech, or Romanian descent would discover their common Slavic identity, and apply for favorable treatment in college admissions, minority set-asides, and so on.... Before long....there would be "Slavic Studies Departments" at major colleges and universities, where intellectuals would debate the exact elements of the "Slavic" culture common to Catholic Poles, Orthodox Russians, and Protestant Hungarians.' As it happens, the federal government has not created a new category called 'Slavics.' And if it had, I doubt whether Romanian Americans and Hungarian Americans, their ancestors having resisted Slavicization for centuries, would embrace the status of born-again 'Slavics,' government blessings notwithstanding. Nevertheless, Lind's comments put to focus a crucial dependence between official government and academic policies on the one hand, and enrollments on the other. In a bid perhaps to discourage the study of anything but Russian, the government poured much money into the study of Russian, while the American academy has made 'Slavic languages' into an almost racial category and, presto, we have Slavic departments. Lind's comment captures well the arbitrary nature of the Slavic construct in the American academy. If ever Catholic Poles, Orthodox Russians, and Protestant Hungarians sat together, the Poles and Hungarians would undoubtedly have much to discuss; but their discussions would not include the question of how to become more perfect Slavs.

The prime reason Polish has not prospered in the academy is that, housed in a 'Slavic' (read: Russian) environment, Polish is consigned at birth to a perpetual condition which Witold Gombrowicz defined as 'upupienie' (fanny-fication, childlike-ness). Years ago, Czeslaw Milosz called attention to the discrimination of Polish in America's Slavic Departments. This has continued.

In the present-day academy, multiculturalism and cultural diversity are code words for a view of the world driven by a peculiar attitude to history.

Every occupation has its hazards. The occupational hazard of American Slavists is the condition of Russophilia. While upupienie is curable, Russophilia does not seem to be. The collapse of the Soviet Empire, an event which no American Slavist of stature predicted (Zbigniew Brzezinski being a rare exception) has failed to raise American Slavists from their posture of genuflection before Mother Russia. American Slavic departments remain chapels supported by university money and designated for worship of an idol no longer favored by student enrollments. In these chapels the arts and crafts of the indigenous inhabitants of Kostroma inspire awe, while courses on Kochanowski or Mickiewicz, Norwid or Orzeszkowa, Milosz or Szymborska, or the poetry and plays of John Paul II are as rare as Kamchatka tulips. Where one talks unquestioningly about Poles charging tanks but not about Catherine the Great sleeping with horses. Where 15-week-long undergraduate courses are devoted to "Russian Culture After the Revolution, 1918-1991" while analogous 15-week courses cover several hundred years of culture in Poland. Where graduate students specializing in Russian complete their studies without ever taking a course in Polish, while students specializing in Polish are required to delight in "Stalin as a literary critic," "Race, class, and gender in collective farm fiction" or "Classics of Socialist Realism." If you combine the multiculturalist's anti-Europe agenda, the high-tech lynching of Poland in American public discourse (what Paul Gottfried calls Polonophobia), the Russocentrism of Slavic Studies in America and, last but not least, the complacency of Polish Americans who view these events with a benign smile, you begin to understand why, even though Polish Americans are the most numerous Slavic group in the country, Polish is among the least developed of the Slavic areas in the American academy. Polish culture's strong identification with Catholicism is an additional and largely unspoken reason for the marginalization of Polish studies at American universities.

Let me now turn to the last factor mentioned: the complacency of Polish Americans. In the 1990 Census, 962,827 Illinois respondents gave Polish as their first ancestry while 144,630 respondents listed Russian. In Chicago the numbers are 216,899 for Polish, 39,721 for Russian. There are 17 states whose Polish population numbers over 100,000; seven of these have a Polish population over 500,000. There is a significant Polish and Polish American presence on the faculties of American colleges and universities. There are several hundred thousand Polish American college alumni, thousands of MDs and lawyers. What have these professionals done to seize the opportunity created by the reemergence of Poland and assist in the introduction of college courses on Poland? These courses would ultimately benefit the entire community. Earlier I described the promising status of Polish programs at Chicago area universities: DePaul, Loyola, St. Xavier. Did it ever occur to the thousands of Polish American alumni of these institutions to call, write, speak up, encourage, cajole the administrations of those institutions in favor of full time tenure track positions in Polish at these institutions? To get closer to home, how many dollars are spent by Polish Americans to finance endeavors such as The Sarmatian Review, which articulate Polish, Polish American, and Central European interests and thus sustain a Polish, Polish American, and Central European presence in the academy? In contrast, the efforts of African American intellectuals in building university programs have been considerable. Or take the Lithuanians: with one-tenth the population of Poles in Chicago, Chicago's Lithuanian Americans established an endowed chair in Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago ten years ago. Perhaps the lesson is this: with ten times the population of Lithuanians, it will take Poles ten times longer to do what Lithuanians in Chicago did ten years ago.

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Samuel P. Huntington writes: '...global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs, and the fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.12

If ever a case was made for the importance of the study of the region between Germany and Russia, it is made here. In this reconfigured environment, East Central Europe, with Poland as its pivot, again marks the civilizational fault line between East and West. A good portion of this cultural boundary is coextensive with the border separating Muscovy from Poland-Lithuania in 1500. These are, indeed, propitious times in which to teach East Central Europe. In courses on this part of the world, students are immediately confronted with questions like: What is Europe? Is there a European identity? Where are Europe's borders? What is meant by terms like Orthodox, Slavic, Latin, Roman, Baltic, Byzantine, Mediterranean? What is meant by rule of law, constitutionalism, absolutism, representative government? How were these notions and values forged over time? Who contributed to their formation? How did they reach the New World? What is culture? In his contribution to the debate on multiculturalism, Professor A. Owen Aldridge observes: "Those who suffer most in our society are not necessarily those who are victims of gender and race. The great disadvantage of multiculturalism is... its concentration on goals other than scholastic achievement and its tendency to ignore or reject universal aesthetic standards. Whether one belongs to the far right or the far left or somewhere in between, it should be possible to read and enjoy works of literature - masterpieces and non-masterpieces - without being mandated to subject them to the tests of gender, race, and sexual 'preference'." (Aldridge 37) Owing to the unfortunate geographic and cultural illiteracy of many college students today, an illiteracy generated by the sad state of secondary education, college culture courses must begin with the basics: geography, demography, introduction to the languages and religions of the world. Building on these basics, the study of foreign cultures fosters a heightened sense of one's own cultural identity, in the case of American students, a sense of the culture which produced the very notion of the university. To this end, students must have available to them courses dealing with European history and culture, including the history and culture of East Central Europe presented not as an appendage to an empire which no longer exists but as a distinctive region whose history offers compelling lessons on culture's power and liberty's cost.

NOTES

1 This is a revised version of a lecture sponsored by the Center for the Study of Cultures and presented to the Central Europe Study Group at Rice University on May 1, 1998.

2 Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, April 1995 and October 1994.

3 (New York: Free Press 1995), 259.

4 Modern Age, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Winter 1997), 28-38.

5 Lawrence Poston, General Education at UIC: A Report from the 1997 Lake Geneva Retreat. University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 1997, 11.

6 Samuel P. Huntington, "The Erosion of American National Interests," Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997, 28-49.

7 Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, September 1996, 25.

8 In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka, ed. Karen L. Morell (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1975), 113-14.

9 In his Texas story,"Sachem" [1883], Henryk Sienkiewicz holds up the fate of Native Americans at the hands of European colonizers as warning to Poles colonized by three nineteenth-century European powers. Sienkiewicz's narrative should give pause to post-colonial theory which excludes Europe as object of colonialist enterprises. Henryk Sienkiewicz, Western Septet, ed. Marion Moore Coleman (Cheshire, CT: Cherry Hill Books 1973), 145-151.

10 Encyclopedia of World Cultures, ed. David Levinson (New York: G.K. Hall 1994), 202.

11 (New York: Free Press 1995), 126.

12 (New York: Simon and Schuster 1996), 125.


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