by Alex Fontana
I traveled with three companions, part of a Pan-European nationalist student group to Richard Spencer’s NPI conference by car from Toronto Canada.
I had not visited our Southern Neighbor since I was a little boy and my father would take me to Buffalo to visit his uncle. On this occasion I observed marked differences between the two countries, some of which I was only conceptually aware of; namely the ubiquitous presence of the military in people's lives, something that is so foregrounded in American society as to be institutionalized in a way Canadians cannot understand in our post-bellum, soft, socialist, multiculturalist dystopia. And, yes, Americans are significantly fatter on average. But there was also a marked religious element pervading their worldview, something altogether transcendent and not always rooted in institutions.
The last salient difference was the prevalence of an especially black underclass, who worked most of the menial jobs, even at SWPL establishments like artisan coffee shops and the like; American blacks also exhibited a pronounced ghetto character. In Toronto, the majority of these types of jobs are done by a medley of South East Asians and brown people, as well as displaced whites, blacks, and students.
We arrived at a rented townhouse, and were greeted by an affable, but simple-looking, tall, middle-aged, blue-eyed man, who was drinking beer and laughing at the end of every sentence. Those who had arrived earlier were out getting food, we were informed. I was ill at ease, and, after awkward introductions, my group decided we would go up the road for dinner as well. Everyone wanted fast-food, but I pressured the group to try an upscale Balkan tapas restaurant instead. The trip down had already meant two fast-food pit stops, and my sense of propriety forbade another one – we are civilized men are we not?
When we got back into the flophouse-turned-frat-house, it was chock full of young men drinking. A stocky guy, introducing himself as Timothy James, made the introductions, and Hugh jumped up onto the stairs to announce the arrival of the Canadians! Tim wore a khaki-coloured trench coat over a dress shirt and necktie, like spooks in old Hollywood films, and began gregariously chatting away, dropping TRS lingo every which way. I held my back against the wall and was mostly silent, studying rather than engaging, repeatedly rejecting the beer that was offered to me, that was until I decided that it might help calm my nerves.
As I made my way through a packed corridor to get to the fridge a big pasty man with a mawkish face dominated by feminine eyelashes stopped to question me.
It was not until we left on the final day that I discovered that the big pasty guy from California had insisted to Hugh and Rob that both Brajan and I were "not white" and questioned Hugh as to why he brought us. The irony here is that this is essentially a form of book burning. Despite Nordic revisionism, the Ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, which are the birthplaces of Western Civilization, were and are predominantly peopled by a Mediterranean type. Nordics claim that these civilizations fell because of racial miscegenation, and degenerated and declined thereafter. However Plato's Republic, a book that deals specifically with the decline of civilization much closer to the actual period involved, makes no reference to race or ethnicity as a factor. Instead, the morphology of ideological types was described as the principle reason for civilizational decline or rise.
Edward Gibbon, who wrote the monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, relates that Christian ideology and decadence were the prevailing factors. The ability to discern in-group vs. out-group based upon physiognomy may have desirable applications – "one face, one race" – however, it is essentially an illiterate form of discrimination that is pre-lingua in its tribal homogeneity. One of the reasons I was attracted to the New or Alt-Right was the emphasis on Western Civilization as a composite of European peoples, rather than a strictly whiter-than-thou approach.
Hegel may have been the first to discriminate against Latin Nations in his Philosophy of History:
Racially this was taken up by Arthur de Gobineau, who accredited the fall of Rome to racial admixture – ironically much of that admixture came from German, Celtic, and Slavic slaves. Gobineau's formulation meant shifting the focus of antagonism from an economic to a racial one, the Third Estate was supposedly comprised of inferior Gauls, while the Ancien Regime was supposedly of Frankish blood. Race acted as a “meta-narrative” that could describe and justify all of society’s aliments. This fueled Nazi purity doctrines and simplistic one-size-fits-all explanations for the historical big picture. Essentialism loomed large – burn the books!
The Twilight Zone episode was interesting, though, as it foreshadowed the advancements in cosmetics and biological engineering that could foster a breed of designer babies, all identical with blue eyes and blonde hair, even if the parents were Negroes or Asians. In the episode some children were taken to a robot factory called Facsimile Ltd, in which they could choose the eye color, hair, nose, ears, etc. of their robotic replacement grandmother. If the robotic grandmother did her duty faithfully and the children loved her, she could be rewarded with the gift of life and humanity. Perhaps if I continue writing and advocating for White Nationalism I could become a real Nord or an honorary Aryan – Pinocchio exclaims, "Look, I’m a real…" Ah fuck this!
I awoke early and showered, and met with my group to get breakfast. Hugh, the de facto leader of the group, had to go set up cameras for the conference, and Rob wanted to go to the Mormon Temple to prospect for wives. That left Brajan and I with the day to wander around Capitol Hill, named after the Capitoline Hill of Rome, and dominated as it is by neoclassical and belle epoch architecture, and the ubiquitous Red, White and Blue.
Capitol Hill is magnificent, imperial, and impressive; Congress, the Smithsonian, the sculpture garden, the obelisks, the White House. But it was the Jefferson Memorial, with its palliative beauty and its walls chiseled with his famous words, that made an indelible impression. That poised and restrained Palladian monument, its classical form resting by the boring murky waters of the Tidal Basin like some Roman apparition. Inside the statesmen’s giant statue loomed over the sanctuary, its bronzed form given greater density against the white marble. The crisp air blew through the ionic columns and soporific birdsong intensified the ancient exquisiteness of the open-to-the-elements concept.
Here was the truly European statesman, who fought the bankers’ upstart Hamilton over creation of the central bank. Here this Odysseus-like revolutionary of high learning, noble feeling, and many refined talents, subsumed in industriousness and elected purpose, was venerated.
Reading his words and being in that shrine, I felt a kind of peace or the presence of historical greatness. The Jeffersonian democratic ideal, with its small independent farmers, constitutional divisions as a safeguard against tyranny, combined with a willingness to experiment, meant a great deal to me when I was an undergrad. But it was this naïve dawn of American experimentation, this unparalleled optimism that once mirrored my own political and historical understanding, that cast a beatific glow over that post-Enlightenment Renaissance man in that moment. Jefferson had achieved that fine balance between the individual and the collective, the federal and the local, the private citizen and the political. But those elevated Enlightenment principles would come to undermine the very material foundations of the fragile Republic.
The grand principle of "Equality" led to civil war and multiculturalism. "Secularization" led to further fragmentation and civic abstraction. "Federalism" became tyranny, while the tone of moral superiority that tied all this together became a rationalization of empire – as Kipling wrote, of the "White Man’s Burden" in his poem about American involvement in the Philippines. Those inherent tensions between the principle of equality and the individual would create a new synthesis of the individual, wholly material and atomized as de Tocqueville noted – ruled by rational selfishness and economics.
Pressing onwards from Jefferson, we came, in the same way that America came, to the monuments to FDR and his wife Eleanor. The sentiments inscribed on the walls of their memorial became more specious, more abstracted and idealized, and further removed from the material facts of government and historical movement.
FDR was an appeaser of economic interests. Rather than abolish the Fed, which had caused the Great Depression by pursuing a policy of inflation before abruptly cutting back the money supply, Roosevelt left the banking system unchanged, and instead borrowed from those same bankers to fund his New Deal, leading enviably as it did to the Military Industrial Complex and the Cold War. Or, as Ezra Pound pointed out:
In such a journey you get a sense of two principally conflicting elements converging as the essence of Americanism: high moral grounding to advance sordid political aims.
This concoction was identified by Francis Parker Yockey as "the technic of cant." According to him, this was first developed by the Anglo-Jewish alliance of the British Empire. Cant, of course, is the expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments, especially the insincere use of pious words. Our most "beloved" politicians – Trudeau and Obama, for example – are experts in cant, inspiring "hope" in the masses through this usage of cant.
The American narrative is strong and alluring, and everywhere in Washington the symbols of empire clash with egalitarian principles; the imperial eagle, the fasces, and neoclassical architecture combine to reconstruct a new Rome. The Lincoln Memorial was still to come, and the narrative of American equality finds its medium with Abraham the Emancipator (and war monger) resting his arms upon the fasces. "I am large, I contain multitudes, I am the man," this monument to federalism seems to say. These liberal ideals seem prescient, but beyond that and beneath them lies something else as Yockey observed, "The world of violence, of cunning, of sin, while maintaining before itself the attitude of selfless morality."
When we arrived at the NPI conference on the eighth-floor rotunda of the federal government’s Ronald Reagan Building, I had not eaten since early noon and was famished running solely on coffee and cigarettes, two vices that I normally control.
Almost as soon as we entered the room, a reporter from a major news magazine pounced upon us, asking if we would like to be interviewed. At first I said sure, but when the line of questioning became increasingly probing and personal I got uncomfortable and declined. That's when Hugh jumped in saying, "I'll do it." I listened.
Emboldened by my comrade's explanations I began to offer my own explanations. I described the power law of the Pareto efficiency as applied to global economics and the shifting of power from the West to the Rest. "A zero-sum game?" quizzed our interlocutor. "Yes," I said, and added that Donald Trump, with his anti-immigrant and anti-China rhetoric, represents the resentment of Western people who have been sold out by their own profit-driven corporations. Even if he becomes a tyrant as the liberal media portray him, I suggested that this was a necessary historical movement, springing from the decadence of democracy. "After all, Plato said that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny."
I conceded that Trump's pro-military and pro-police rhetoric is scary in an era of the total security state, but that maybe America deserves a tyrant. But, I said, it's not about race, just because the media likes to portray Trump and his supporters as racists. It’s much more about the cyclical law of decay.
Briefly I talked about how American blacks have always represented an historical fissure in American identity, which was supposed to be based on a European melting pot idea. The existence of Blacks "in the mix" pushed the principles of America's founding fathers too far from the concrete to the abstract – out of necessity! Jews were part of that too, I said, surmising that the journalist, as suggested by his name, employment, and demeanor was "of that persuasion."
Hugh asked me to work one of the recording cameras for the event, which is how I got the free ticket and ride. The proceedings began with Richard Spencer introducing the event and then Ramzpaul gave a slideshow presentation. Ramzpaul's presentation was part comedy and part pep talk and went on a little long, with a video presentation at the end about not wasting your life, directed at the many young people in attendance.
Next was Professor MacDonald, whose talk was largely focused on Donald Trump, followed by Spencer, who delivered an oration on the same subject. Nothing particularly salient emerged from the talking points, just a general consensus that Trump's stance on immigration was a movement in the Alt-Right’s direction and that identity matters.
That night, out at a bar, a bunch of us were drinking. At some point Hugh introduced me to a fellow Canadian, a lawyer from British Columbia. I asked him if he was Irish, but then he began wailing away about how he hated the Irish. I told him I liked the Irish. He was saying how he supported the Ulster Ascendancy and how the IRA were "a bunch of sucks."
They all left and I stood around, smoking my last 'friend' down to the filter. Some black guy who had been listening and trying to sell a scrappy newspaper came up to me.
Connected Content:
The Great St. Paddy's Day Rumble
I had not visited our Southern Neighbor since I was a little boy and my father would take me to Buffalo to visit his uncle. On this occasion I observed marked differences between the two countries, some of which I was only conceptually aware of; namely the ubiquitous presence of the military in people's lives, something that is so foregrounded in American society as to be institutionalized in a way Canadians cannot understand in our post-bellum, soft, socialist, multiculturalist dystopia. And, yes, Americans are significantly fatter on average. But there was also a marked religious element pervading their worldview, something altogether transcendent and not always rooted in institutions.
The last salient difference was the prevalence of an especially black underclass, who worked most of the menial jobs, even at SWPL establishments like artisan coffee shops and the like; American blacks also exhibited a pronounced ghetto character. In Toronto, the majority of these types of jobs are done by a medley of South East Asians and brown people, as well as displaced whites, blacks, and students.
We arrived at a rented townhouse, and were greeted by an affable, but simple-looking, tall, middle-aged, blue-eyed man, who was drinking beer and laughing at the end of every sentence. Those who had arrived earlier were out getting food, we were informed. I was ill at ease, and, after awkward introductions, my group decided we would go up the road for dinner as well. Everyone wanted fast-food, but I pressured the group to try an upscale Balkan tapas restaurant instead. The trip down had already meant two fast-food pit stops, and my sense of propriety forbade another one – we are civilized men are we not?
When we got back into the flophouse-turned-frat-house, it was chock full of young men drinking. A stocky guy, introducing himself as Timothy James, made the introductions, and Hugh jumped up onto the stairs to announce the arrival of the Canadians! Tim wore a khaki-coloured trench coat over a dress shirt and necktie, like spooks in old Hollywood films, and began gregariously chatting away, dropping TRS lingo every which way. I held my back against the wall and was mostly silent, studying rather than engaging, repeatedly rejecting the beer that was offered to me, that was until I decided that it might help calm my nerves.
The world being put to rights with the aid of alcohol. |
"Are you Egyptian?" he asked.I walked back to the wall to put my back against it once more. My Serbian friend Brajan, who has a Byzantine-Dinaric look, asked if I wanted to take a walk. I did. When we got back, sleeping arrangements were settled, but the yahoos were up almost all night drinking and babbling making sleep nearly impossible. I flipped though the half dozen channels available on the TV and settled on a Twilight Zone episode, entitled “I Sing the Body Electric,” later discovering that it was the centennial episode written by Ray Bradbury, the acclaimed author of Fahrenheit 451. This produced some synchronistic irony.
"Would I be here if I was?"
"I don’t know. What are you?" he said, sizing me up.
"I'm Italian." I got the beer. Unfortunately it was hoppy, and I hate hoppy beer.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"California."
It was not until we left on the final day that I discovered that the big pasty guy from California had insisted to Hugh and Rob that both Brajan and I were "not white" and questioned Hugh as to why he brought us. The irony here is that this is essentially a form of book burning. Despite Nordic revisionism, the Ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, which are the birthplaces of Western Civilization, were and are predominantly peopled by a Mediterranean type. Nordics claim that these civilizations fell because of racial miscegenation, and degenerated and declined thereafter. However Plato's Republic, a book that deals specifically with the decline of civilization much closer to the actual period involved, makes no reference to race or ethnicity as a factor. Instead, the morphology of ideological types was described as the principle reason for civilizational decline or rise.
Edward Gibbon, who wrote the monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, relates that Christian ideology and decadence were the prevailing factors. The ability to discern in-group vs. out-group based upon physiognomy may have desirable applications – "one face, one race" – however, it is essentially an illiterate form of discrimination that is pre-lingua in its tribal homogeneity. One of the reasons I was attracted to the New or Alt-Right was the emphasis on Western Civilization as a composite of European peoples, rather than a strictly whiter-than-thou approach.
Hegel may have been the first to discriminate against Latin Nations in his Philosophy of History:
"They are the product of Roman and German blood, and still retain the heterogeneity thence resulting."He called this the principle of Disharmony within the Latin soul. This Disharmony was the reason why Latin nations had retained Catholicism and not accepted the Protestant Reformation, according to Hegel. Max Weber's thesis on the Protestant work ethic essentially meant that Protestantism aligned its ethos with a bourgeois meritocracy, as opposed to an Aristocratic order founded in Catholicism. This coalesced with the ideas of Francis Galton, who applied Darwinism to social positioning in a free market. Along with Malthus’ theorizing of population growth outstripping resources, this meant that that races could be measured based on economic positioning. With the dominant economic bases at the time being in Northern Europe, principally England, this led to inflating the egos of a rising national consciousness based upon ethnicity.
Racially this was taken up by Arthur de Gobineau, who accredited the fall of Rome to racial admixture – ironically much of that admixture came from German, Celtic, and Slavic slaves. Gobineau's formulation meant shifting the focus of antagonism from an economic to a racial one, the Third Estate was supposedly comprised of inferior Gauls, while the Ancien Regime was supposedly of Frankish blood. Race acted as a “meta-narrative” that could describe and justify all of society’s aliments. This fueled Nazi purity doctrines and simplistic one-size-fits-all explanations for the historical big picture. Essentialism loomed large – burn the books!
Romans managing to decline on their own without too much help from their menials. |
************
I awoke early and showered, and met with my group to get breakfast. Hugh, the de facto leader of the group, had to go set up cameras for the conference, and Rob wanted to go to the Mormon Temple to prospect for wives. That left Brajan and I with the day to wander around Capitol Hill, named after the Capitoline Hill of Rome, and dominated as it is by neoclassical and belle epoch architecture, and the ubiquitous Red, White and Blue.
Capitol Hill is magnificent, imperial, and impressive; Congress, the Smithsonian, the sculpture garden, the obelisks, the White House. But it was the Jefferson Memorial, with its palliative beauty and its walls chiseled with his famous words, that made an indelible impression. That poised and restrained Palladian monument, its classical form resting by the boring murky waters of the Tidal Basin like some Roman apparition. Inside the statesmen’s giant statue loomed over the sanctuary, its bronzed form given greater density against the white marble. The crisp air blew through the ionic columns and soporific birdsong intensified the ancient exquisiteness of the open-to-the-elements concept.
The Jefferson Memorial's open door policy. |
Reading his words and being in that shrine, I felt a kind of peace or the presence of historical greatness. The Jeffersonian democratic ideal, with its small independent farmers, constitutional divisions as a safeguard against tyranny, combined with a willingness to experiment, meant a great deal to me when I was an undergrad. But it was this naïve dawn of American experimentation, this unparalleled optimism that once mirrored my own political and historical understanding, that cast a beatific glow over that post-Enlightenment Renaissance man in that moment. Jefferson had achieved that fine balance between the individual and the collective, the federal and the local, the private citizen and the political. But those elevated Enlightenment principles would come to undermine the very material foundations of the fragile Republic.
The grand principle of "Equality" led to civil war and multiculturalism. "Secularization" led to further fragmentation and civic abstraction. "Federalism" became tyranny, while the tone of moral superiority that tied all this together became a rationalization of empire – as Kipling wrote, of the "White Man’s Burden" in his poem about American involvement in the Philippines. Those inherent tensions between the principle of equality and the individual would create a new synthesis of the individual, wholly material and atomized as de Tocqueville noted – ruled by rational selfishness and economics.
Pressing onwards from Jefferson, we came, in the same way that America came, to the monuments to FDR and his wife Eleanor. The sentiments inscribed on the walls of their memorial became more specious, more abstracted and idealized, and further removed from the material facts of government and historical movement.
FDR was an appeaser of economic interests. Rather than abolish the Fed, which had caused the Great Depression by pursuing a policy of inflation before abruptly cutting back the money supply, Roosevelt left the banking system unchanged, and instead borrowed from those same bankers to fund his New Deal, leading enviably as it did to the Military Industrial Complex and the Cold War. Or, as Ezra Pound pointed out:
"There is no reason the Federal Reserve Board shd. be a private instrument of the executive… That effectively bitches the Jeffersonian system. Destroys balance between execut. Judic. and legislature."Then we moved on to MLK Jr. Walking through Washington DC, if you choose your direction "correctly," can serve as a progressive narrative: all men being self-evidently equal leading to the abolition of ignorance and intolerance, and slavery and war, and then out of this mountain of despair a stone of hope – an ideological journey that weaves through and in-between the pillars of Empire and power.
Apparently the sculptor gave up half-way through. |
This concoction was identified by Francis Parker Yockey as "the technic of cant." According to him, this was first developed by the Anglo-Jewish alliance of the British Empire. Cant, of course, is the expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments, especially the insincere use of pious words. Our most "beloved" politicians – Trudeau and Obama, for example – are experts in cant, inspiring "hope" in the masses through this usage of cant.
The American narrative is strong and alluring, and everywhere in Washington the symbols of empire clash with egalitarian principles; the imperial eagle, the fasces, and neoclassical architecture combine to reconstruct a new Rome. The Lincoln Memorial was still to come, and the narrative of American equality finds its medium with Abraham the Emancipator (and war monger) resting his arms upon the fasces. "I am large, I contain multitudes, I am the man," this monument to federalism seems to say. These liberal ideals seem prescient, but beyond that and beneath them lies something else as Yockey observed, "The world of violence, of cunning, of sin, while maintaining before itself the attitude of selfless morality."
************
When we arrived at the NPI conference on the eighth-floor rotunda of the federal government’s Ronald Reagan Building, I had not eaten since early noon and was famished running solely on coffee and cigarettes, two vices that I normally control.
Almost as soon as we entered the room, a reporter from a major news magazine pounced upon us, asking if we would like to be interviewed. At first I said sure, but when the line of questioning became increasingly probing and personal I got uncomfortable and declined. That's when Hugh jumped in saying, "I'll do it." I listened.
Emboldened by my comrade's explanations I began to offer my own explanations. I described the power law of the Pareto efficiency as applied to global economics and the shifting of power from the West to the Rest. "A zero-sum game?" quizzed our interlocutor. "Yes," I said, and added that Donald Trump, with his anti-immigrant and anti-China rhetoric, represents the resentment of Western people who have been sold out by their own profit-driven corporations. Even if he becomes a tyrant as the liberal media portray him, I suggested that this was a necessary historical movement, springing from the decadence of democracy. "After all, Plato said that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny."
I conceded that Trump's pro-military and pro-police rhetoric is scary in an era of the total security state, but that maybe America deserves a tyrant. But, I said, it's not about race, just because the media likes to portray Trump and his supporters as racists. It’s much more about the cyclical law of decay.
Briefly I talked about how American blacks have always represented an historical fissure in American identity, which was supposed to be based on a European melting pot idea. The existence of Blacks "in the mix" pushed the principles of America's founding fathers too far from the concrete to the abstract – out of necessity! Jews were part of that too, I said, surmising that the journalist, as suggested by his name, employment, and demeanor was "of that persuasion."
"One of your people Zangwill wrote the melting pot play."I was feeling slightly ungrounded and Brajan shook my hand, saying, "That was awesome." I got food, mashed potatoes and roast beef, but I did not even taste it, as I stood chatting at a table with an old white guy with a confederate flag tie and his younger Filipino wife. All the waiting staff were black and many of us contemplated, like Kerouac had, what was going on inside their heads.
"One of my people?" he quizzed in mock coyness.
"Yeh, a Jew."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," said Hugh, "How do you know he's a Jew?"
"His name tag," I said gesturing to his press pass.
"I am Jewish," he said.
"See," I said to Hugh.
"How do you feel about the Jews?" he asked me.
I put on my broadest smile and said, "Lovely people, the best."
"I can’t tell if you’re being honest," he said.
I laughed. "How come you don't cover AIPAC this way?"
"We do cover AIPAC. You should read us."
Hugh tried to break this off by steering the reporter towards Professor Kevin MacDonald.
"What do you consider yourself?" I asked.
"I’m an American," the journalist said.
"You can’t be anything other than what you are," I said.
"Anyways," he said, sensing essentialism creeping in, "it was Aristotle who said that thing about democracy and tyranny."
"Really?" said Hugh.
"Yes, it was in the Nicomachean Ethics."
"Doesn’t matter," I said. "Spengler said it too," still smiling.
Last minute advertising for the Conference. |
Next was Professor MacDonald, whose talk was largely focused on Donald Trump, followed by Spencer, who delivered an oration on the same subject. Nothing particularly salient emerged from the talking points, just a general consensus that Trump's stance on immigration was a movement in the Alt-Right’s direction and that identity matters.
That night, out at a bar, a bunch of us were drinking. At some point Hugh introduced me to a fellow Canadian, a lawyer from British Columbia. I asked him if he was Irish, but then he began wailing away about how he hated the Irish. I told him I liked the Irish. He was saying how he supported the Ulster Ascendancy and how the IRA were "a bunch of sucks."
"Yea man, how dare they want their own country," I said mockingly, "I mean the Potato Famine was the planned genocide of one third of their population because of English landowners. What a bunch of fucking sucks."When we went outside to smoke, the group of guys fell silent. The Anglo lawyer eyed me suspiciously. "You can talk about me to my face. It’s OK," I said. They stood around peevishly. Then I went into a sarcastic monologue about how Rome fell due to miscegenation and that we were inferior stock and so on. The lawyer left and Timothy James confided in me that he was quarter Sicilian and suggested I should introduce myself to the others as Alex Fontana.
They all left and I stood around, smoking my last 'friend' down to the filter. Some black guy who had been listening and trying to sell a scrappy newspaper came up to me.
"You Italian, man?" he asked in ghetto patois.
"Yea."
"I love Italians, man. Fuck those guys. They're pussies," he said, giving me a fist bump. "Wanna buy this paper, man?"
Connected Content:
The Great St. Paddy's Day Rumble
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