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Surprising how many people still don’t realize how important and far-reaching is Madelyn Murray’s suit to Tax the Churches and how, when it reaches the Supreme Court, it might change the entire real estate tax structure of this country. Being a tough determined woman she’ll almost certainly fight the case all the way—and win. In a recent letter she told me that she keeps reading about all the people who are collecting money in her name, but she never sees any of it. Her ONLY address is Madelyn Murray O’Hair, P. O. Box 2117, Austin, Texas 78767. Baltimore assault case against her has been dropped...

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a review of

The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon. Seven Stories Press, 2016, 320 pp. English translation from French by Nick Caistor

“Today, it is an older, wearier Nadia who raises her arms. She leans into a back walkover, but she falters and falls. “I am not a perfect 10 anymore,” Nadia says. “I can only try my best.”

—People Magazine, 1990 (she was 28)

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The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naomi Epel with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate, Calendar 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

SUN the 16^th

HEAL along with Oral Roverts at Cobo Hall. Sponsored by North American Baptist Convention. Call Cobo for ticket info. 8/16

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Three entrapped anarchists, part of the Cleveland 4, were sentenced November 21 to harsh but lighter prison terms than what the federal prosecutors requested for an alleged conspiracy to blow up a highway bridge near Cleveland on May Day.

Three of the Cleveland 4, Douglas Wright, Connor Stevens, and Brandon Baxter, received 11 years, eight years, and almost ten years respectively on federal terrorism charges, followed by lifetime probation. The fourth, Joshua Stafford, as of this writing, is in a federal facility undergoing competency testing.

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Deadline: May 1

Publication date: June 1

The war in Vietnam, the first great defeat of American imperialism, came to an ignominious conclusion 40 years ago, at the end of April 1975.

The United States Congress has authorized the Secretary of Defense “to conduct a program to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Vietnam War.” This obscene commemoration of a shameful war should not go unanswered. We need to remind the world of its true heroes and victims--the Vietnamese people, the anti-war movement, and the draft resisters--and say No! to the celebration of the imperial war machine.

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“Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind. In other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion.”

--Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man

Deadline: November 1, 2012 Publication date: December, 2012

Sex. It is perhaps the most loaded word in the English language, with numerous connotations and denotations. In this issue of Fifth Estate, we want to explore sex and sexuality in all its forms, exposing the naked truths, and teasing out the possibilities. No topic is too risqué.

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Rainbow

Can you float through the universe of

your body and not lose your way?

Can you lie quietly

engulfed

in the slippery union

of male and female?

Warm wet dance of generation?

Endless ecstasies of couples?

Can you offer your stamen trembling in

the meadow for the electric penetration of pollen

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Welcome to our Spring 2015 issue, with the murderous U.S. war against Vietnam as its main theme. The essays and fiction describe the conflict itself, while next issue will feature accounts of the resistance from the anti-war movement, mutinous GIs, and the Vietnamese.

The Fall edition will mark our 50^th anniversary of radical publishing and will include essays commemorating the paper’s history. Plans for a celebration, a staff reunion, and museum exhibits in Detroit are on the next and back pages.

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Sweet Music-Muzak—that background music featured in supermarkets, office buildings and factories is invading the People’s Republic of China. The Western regional director of the-Muzak Corporation, Bert Mitchell, has told Pacific News Service that a Muzak salesman has just returned from a very successful sales trip to the Chinese mainland. According to Mitchell—in his words—“He spent a whole month there, selling our systems. The Chinese were crazy about them.”

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a review of

“Carmen” (2022) Dir: Benjamin Millepied

Benjamin Millepied’s retelling of the classic opera “Carmen” feels like the kind of movie that you need some time to process...and then some more after that...and then even more later on. It’s hard for someone to make up their mind about a film and safely tuck it away, never to be examined again, when the density of the film in question insists on coming back to haunt the viewer.

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“I don’t want to startle you, but they mean to kill us all.”

—e.e. cummings

War—the word on everyone’s lips—the deadly end of the capitalist cycle of prosperity and economic collapse, appears close at hand as the major world empires and their vassals play out the world-wide “Great Game” of inter-capitalist rivalries. In this country, President Carter has posed the situation in the Persian Gulf region as a new period of confrontation with the Soviet Union and a return to the Cold War, complete with renewed fears of nuclear conflict.

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Now that the Hua Kuo-feng faction of the Chinese Communist party is firmly in control of the People’s Republic any number of Maoist concepts have been slated for the waste basket of history.

One of the most recent to go is the late Chairman’s guerrilla strategy of “people’s war” which long insisted that men, not weapons, were the key factor in war and had China preparing for a guerrilla defense against an invader.

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It’s a rare case when someone can go home from the job and say they’ve done a constructive day’s work, and an even rarer case when 4,000 people from the same place can say it at the same time.

But that was exactly the case September 21, when the Chrysler Corporation was forced to close its Lynch Road Plant in Detroit because of worker sabotage and vandalism.

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The SEE, the new concerthouse opened last month by Trans-Love Energies Unlimited of Detroit, closed its doors after only two weekends in operation.

The hippy-run coffeehouse, which featured music by the MC-5, the Spikedrivers, the Passing Clouds, Billy C. and the Sunshine, and the Charles Moore Ensemble during its brief history, along with lights by the Magic Veil Light Company, ran into business snags that made operation of the cooperative concerthouse impossible, according to former manager and Fifth Estate staff member John Sinclair.

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Six million Jews did not die in Germany during World War II, anyone should know there was but sixty thousand of them in all of Europe. Franklin Roosevelt was a dirty commie. John Sinclair is a dirty commie. Water fluoridation and LSD are both Communist plots. So is marijuana. All the yellow trash in Asia is not worth the life of one white, American soldier.

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To the Editor:

Several things. It’s a long term blues and bound for longer but I find, in the FIFTH ESTATE, some hope. For that, thank you. Also for:

A. Printing news items of conceptually strangulated editorial policies, conventional newspapers either minimize and bury with the obits or omit entirely. This is especially valuable to me, vitally involved and interested and yet geographically removed from the essential dialogues.

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Colonel Arthur Holmes, Director of the Selective Service System for the State of Michigan, announced that at his order, all male students from Michigan now entering their Freshman year of college will automatically be classified I-A by their local draft boards. After taking a pre-induction physical examination, all students over 19 will be served with induction notices. The students will then have to apply for the 1 year statutory deferment for registered students, I-S(C). At the end of the Freshman year, the students will be drafted unless they prove to the satisfaction of their local boards that they deserve a II-S student deferment.

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COVER: “St. Mary of the Machines”--Stephen Goodfellow BACK: Joey Salamon

3 AnarchoShorts & Other tales from the planet

3 Letters

4 Fifth Estate celebrates 50^th year

5 The Rojava Revolution

Andrew Flood

6 All Organizing is Science Fiction

adrienne maree brown

7 When the War Comes Home

Marieke Bivar

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Fifth Estate, #393, Spring 2015, Vol. 50, No. 1

2 Letters

4 Anarchy in Kurdistan

Bill Weinberg

7 Eric McDavid Freed!

FE Staff

8 Armed Madhouse

Bryan Tucker

9 Justice for Franco Fascists?

David Porter

11 Sam Mbah Dies

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back

12 Florida’s Burnpile Press

Matt Keene

13 An Anarchist in Berlin

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I’m reading the latest (FE #328, Spring 1988) and finding it enjoyable as always, I would like to take issue, however, with your slam on the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). [See “Even More Minneapolis Anarchy,” FE #328, Spring, 1988.]

It appears to me that your anti-organizational ideology is blinding you to the real activity of real people.

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It starts with a story: My grandma, worried that her 3-year-old son had not spoken a word yet, had him chase down a grasshopper. Diligently, without complaint, the boy did and returned with a smile. Open she said; confused and scared, he did. She shoved it in and closed his mouth. Hablas, mijo, hablas. He spit it out crying. Crying and yelling. He has not stopped either since she says and smiles thinking of her now 50 year old son talking his time away in a New Mexican state penitentiary.

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UNCLASSIEIEDS cost 50¢ per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

DISCOUNT RATES Five runs cost 35¢ per line.

I’m sending (blank) lines at 50¢ per line for a one issue run.

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They shall all tell you, one by one, when you cross them, collectively

individually, in court lobbies or hotel lounges, in schools or inside

mosques. They shall tell you only what they shall tell you, in their

Abyssinian rhetoric of generational apology. They shall tell you the

same old bullshit they vomited before, and after the great flood of the

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Dear Fifth Estate,

After reading the June 19^th issue [FE #298, June 19, 1979] I would like to make some comments regarding your attack on “civilization” and your glorification of hunter/ gatherer life.

First, I agree with the point that increased technology does not increase leisure time and in fact has the opposite result. However this is not a new “revolutionary” theory. Marvin Harris has made the same point in Culture, People, Nature several years ago, and has drawn similar conclusions about the “virtues” of technological progress.

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Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.

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Saludos Companeros:

Your review of the Dolgoff book on Cuba (FE #286, Sept. 1977) left a lot to be desired. As anarchist propaganda that book is a disaster. At the least, it’s sloppy work and may be even worse than that. One thing anarchists do not need to do is run out a line of bullshit rhetoric, exaggerate and distort when attacking an authoritarian enemy. Soviet style authoritarians provide sufficient ammunition and targets; there’s no need to create new ones. For sure, “names will never hurt them.”

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UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word, including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201. phone 831–6800

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The English musical scene is really a bummer. English audiences are mostly composed of teenyboppers that still dig “The Midnight Hour.” Yet there is a growing group that is really beginning to get into the music thing and love to hear a band kick out the jams.

Probably the most interesting musical group on the English horizon is “The Family.” It is composed of some older college type cats who are not only saying something in their music about the conditions of the society that we live in, but also happen to be very expert musicians.

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Friday, 7pm-11pm, Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St.

Mitchell Verter, editor of Dreams of Freedom, on Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon and contemporary Magonism, a video and music.

The Bookfair. Saturday, 10am-7pm. Massachusetts College of Art, Pozen Center, 621 Huntington Ave. Tables from distros, radical bookstores, Info-shops, and publishers. Speakers, workshops, panel discussions, and films.

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Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anarchists with the bad luck of being misidentified by mental health professionals who: (1) are ignorant of the social philosophy of anarchism, (2) embrace, often without political consciousness, its opposite ideology of hierarchism, and (3) confuse the signs of anarchism with symptoms of mental illness.

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A Detroit Diggers Society has materialized in the Warren-Forest area and is in the process of being “organized” by two neighborhood hippies, Dan Vincent and Cindy Lee. Organization to the Diggers means getting a place to operate out of, scrounging up rent money and donations of money, food, clothing, and housing, all to be distributed freely among the people of the community.

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“The American war machine reaps a whirlwind that engulfs our country and threatens the world. Three billion dollars a month, which could be spent to attack the intolerable conditions of our disinherited cities is spent instead to kill and destroy in Vietnam. The insulted’ and injured at home have no choice but to act out their despair by rebelling.”

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—Nixon’s public relations men are calling it an “economic readjustment,” but in English it’s a full blown economic recession.

U.S. Labor Dept. unemployment figures show joblessness for April at 4.8%, the highest since 1965, when U.S. “escalation” of the Vietnam war began.

Lines at unemployment compensation offices in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Birmingham, Ala. are spilling out onto the sidewalks. 3,700,000 Americans can’t find jobs—and that’s one million more than a year ago.

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FIFTH ESTATE #106, May 28-June 10, 1970, Vol. 5 No. 2

Debby Brentz

David Gaynes

Carol George

Mike John

Keep on Truckin’ Co-op

Resa Jannett

Jim Kennedy

Lee Ann Kennedy

David Levison

Julie Medvecky

Harvey Ovshinsky

Dave Riddle

Bill Rowe

Len Schafer

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

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<strong>The Fifth Estate

</strong> A newspaper of Detroit

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Harvey Ovshinsky

Tommye Wiese

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

CALENDAR

Resa Jannett

STAFF

Laura Straight

Marlene Tyre

Marilyn Werbe

The FIFTH ESTATE is published every other Thursday of each month by the Fifth Estate Newspaper, Inc., 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

...

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, layout and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at P.O. Box 02548, Detroit, Michigan 48202 USA;

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Fifth Estate

“To Serve the People”

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin, Peter Werbe, Cathy West

MANAGING EDITOR

Bill Rowe

DISTRIBUTION

Keep On Truckin’ Co-op

STAFF

Jane Capellaro

Dena Clamage

Bob Fleck

David Gaynes

Joel Landy

Bruce Montrose

Claudia Montrose

Marilyn Werbe

Tommye Wiese

POLITICAL PRISONER

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Here are four records you might want to have:

1. Otis Spann: Sweet Giant of the Blues, Bluestime BTS-9006.

2. Harmonica Slim: The Return of Harmonica Slim, Bluestime BTS9005.

3. T-Bone Walker/Joe Turner/Otis Spann: Super Black Blues, Bluestime BTS-9003.

4. Earl Hooker: Don’t Have to Worry, Bluesway BLS 6032.

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a review of

Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser

In Direct Action, Luke Hauser writes fiction so steeped in reality that he reproduces an era for us, with all of its excitement and frustrations.

Although the 1980s are generally thought of as a kind of dead zone for progressive activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area the early part of the decade was a time of fervent activism around nuclear issues.

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“La Patagonia rebelde”

Director: Hector Olivera

110 min. (1974)

The death of Argentine anarchist author and activist Osvaldo Bayer on December 24, 2018 came at a time of renewed interest in his long career. Recent translations of two of his works, The Anarchist Expropriators and Rebellion in Patagonia, were published by AK Press in 2016.

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According to Time Magazine, prostitution has always been part of the American soldier’s life. It is a continuation of a grand tradition going back to the Crusades and extending through the vivandieres of World War I to the B-Girls called tea girls in Saigon today. After dysentery and other intestinal diseases had multiplied fourfold in four months and venereal disease had afflicted one-third of the 21,000 troopers of the U.S. first cavalry (Airmobile) in the small town of An Khe in the central highlands, the local commander acted. He made the town off limits. Prices, which the soldiers had forced up, and disease rates soon fell but, as Time puts it, “In March the first cases of ‘battle fatigue’ showed up.”

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Just when everything starts to look gloomy on a cold Detroit winter’s day, along comes one of those rays of hope that helps keep up everyone’s morale—a bank closing! This time it’s those sleazes at the Feminist Federal Credit Union.

Writing in their newsletter, Financing Feminism, these bankers expressed a sense of loss over having to withdraw their Detroit offices from the balance sheet because of waning interest. They’ve decided to throw all their capital behind an Ann Arbor office. Too bad, bankers, but as they say in the world of high finance: “your loss is our gain.” We only hope that your brothers in the money business will soon cash in their chips...

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a review of

No Gods; No Masters: A History of Anarchism (2017) (Originally: Ni dieu, ni maitre. Une histoire de l’anarchisme) Writer/Director: Tancrede Ramonet. 156 min. Color/B&W (French, German with English subtitles) Available from Icarus Films icarusfilms.com/if-nogods

For average Americans, the word anarchy calls to mind chaos, destruction, lawlessness, and violence. Most modern Westerners know little about the people, philosophies, and history that make up the broader political and cultural movement we identify under the term anarchism.

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Brandon Jones Mooney, Tracy Michelle Hughes and Aishe Keita in “Reparations.”—photo: Aaron Jin

a review of

“Reparations”

Darren Canady, Playwright,

Jay O’Leary, Director

World Premiere, Sound Theatre Company, Seattle, Jan. 10, 2020

Reparations examines inherited historical trauma, whether that trauma can be healed, and, if so, how.

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On Thursday, January 23, 1969, the Metropolitan Detroit Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union will present a film, “The Seasons Change,” and a panel discussion on the events which occurred in Chicago during the Democratic Party Convention.

“The Seasons Change” is a one-hour film in response to the City of Chicago and Mayor Daley’s “What Trees Do They Plant?”, which was carried on many TV stations some months ago.

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While local music business people continue to hype the Detroit scene as a major center of the pop world the scene itself continues to deteriorate and no one seems to care enough about it to do anything constructive.

Quite the contrary, the trend seems to be toward copying all the mistakes that have been made in every other “major music center” in order to exploit every last nickel to be had from the people.

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While working as a human rights activist in Guatemala, I learned some of the most profound lessons of resistance. There, I experienced some of the greatest despair imaginable and some of the greatest hope.

In the 1950s, reformers and an indigenous majority—who wanted to end hunger and virtual enslavement on fruit and coffee plantations—challenged generations of neo-colonial rule. Their pleas for freedom were met by a CIA/US corporate directed coup, a series of military dictators and a scorched earth campaign against Mayan villages. Death squads committed a notorious crime against Guatemalans, the torture and murder of desaparecidos thought to be subversives—tens of thousands have been disappeared and never heard from again. The targets: union organizers, students, human rights supporters, and anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. When people spoke out against these horrors they, too, would disappear, ensuring a frightened public would not organize effective resistance.

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I had a groovy Thanksgiving that I’d like to tell you about: Some of my friends asked me if I’d like to cook for about 30 people.

What I took on as a challenge turned out to be a great night of eating for over a hundred people. Charlie Auringer, Myron Green, Steve Swainson, Eric Morrice, and Barry Kramer all live and work out of a huge studio loft on Cass which easily accommodated our friends and guests.

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Now that Fall is here, I hope to be more regular with this column. I just haven’t been in the mood to write about food, what with the world coming down all around. But as my editor says, politics is a dime a lime, but everyone likes to Eat It.

Bradley Jones keeps asking me for some one dish casserole recipes so I’ll start with my own chili recipe. I like chili very thick and sort of spicy sweet.

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MUSSOLINI’S ITALY

“A hero is he who can pierce with the mystic light of an inner vision to the very heart of things; he who can re-discover the greatest and most profound of all truths: viz., that beyond his realm of fugitive appearances there lies, immutable and eternal, what Fichte called the ‘Divine Idea of the World;’ finally, he who, living already in spirit in this realm of timeless and absolute Reality, is able to translate his vision into deeds and to act according to the dictates of an inner voice telling him that ‘...they wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.’

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