A review of O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It"

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Here is the text for your wrapper:
Orenthal James Simpson was born July 9, 1947 in San Francisco, California. From 1969 till 1978 he was a professional American football player and became a great star. After that he started a career as an actor.

Now, if you haven't read the book yet, you might want to stop reading this review here and start reading the book.

Part II

In every interview O.J. Simpson plays a different character, each with his own views and opinions. All these characters have two things in common: they share Mr. Simpson's biography and they don't lie. The same goes for the hero of “If I did it”. So, at the surface, you get some information about what really went on between Mr. Simpson and Nicole Brown.

On a deeper level it is the story of the Fall. In a common interpretation of the bible, original sin happened a long time ago and since then people are born with it. I don't think that is what the author of Genesis meant. Original sin is passed on to every new generation; it is done to children and the Fall is the effect it has on them. The hero, whom I will call “O.J.” to tell him apart from the author, plays the part of such a child. Therefore he has some of the characteristics of a child, including a child's tendency to take people's behavior as it comes without putting much effort into analyzing it. This has the great advantage that we don't need references to scenes and arguments that would be far too personal and none of our business. It's all nothing but the truth but not, by far, the whole truth.

So at the superficial level this is autobiography. On the deeper level it is fiction.

The real story

In 1989 Mr. Simpson could probably have proved that he was innocent of abuse. All he did was pulling Nicole Brown out of the room in a way that he later considered too violent. That police officer John Edwards lied about her alleged injuries was proved by a hospital report. But I think that if the truth would have come out people would have wondered if Nicole Brown was a bit crazy ... She called 911 because she was in a state of fury and he locked her out of the room, not because of abuse. He sacrificed his own reputation for the sake of protecting hers. I don't get the impression she ever realized that. When any authority asked her “Did he ever hit you?” she said “once” referring to 1989. Mr. Simpson never explicitly denied that, as he didn't want to contradict her. So in the civil court they asked “Did you hit her?” and he said “You mean punched her? No”. Of course everybody took that as a confession that he did hit her. He didn't. He couldn't deliberately hurt anybody and has always gone out of his way to avoid unintentionally hurting somebody. Maybe she thought he did, that time. “O.J.” takes that “once” as a simplification of what happened, but I don't know if that really is what she meant. I suppose Mr. Simpson does know, but he won't tell us.

So she was a bit crazy and a bit out of touch with reality. This is something that has been obvious for a long time to everyone who tries to make sense out of things. Time and again Mr. Simpson has made huge sacrifices to protect her privacy and reputation, at the expense of his own, but with the media-people just going on sticking there noses where they don't belong, and her personal life being shamelessly discussed on TV, we already knew so much that all he could do was to give us some more information to put things in their place. I must say that some of the things she did really made me very angry, where as I can now understand them better and find them a bit more acceptable.

She made 911 calls. I understand Mr. Simpson only knew about three: in 1984, when she, when a police officer arrived, said it had been a mistake, and the other two in 1989 and 1993. The transcript of the last one you find in the book, so that you can see for yourself it makes no sense. (I'm afraid she hasn't been the only person in history to have used the police to participate in dramatic domestic scenes.)

Many marriages go wrong after the children are born because your children bring back your own childhood. Nicole Brown started physically attacking Mr. Simpson after the birth of their second child. I know of only one reason why a woman gets physically aggressive like her: experience with physical abuse as a child. The abuse stories she told sometimes to some people must have been projections. (This doesn't mean she is to be compared with the witch-hunters who use their target for that. Unlike the ones you see in TV-series, a real marriage is some kind of psycho-analysis and that often involves projection.) “She was a bad liar” says “O.J.”, which is a compliment. Bad liars are people who have some kind of censor in the back of their heads which makes their stories unconvincing. The people she told those stories to later blamed themselves for not doing anything. I can tell them why: they were not at all sure they were true.

What else is there to say? They got divorced, and she got in touch with Faye Resnick's crowd. In the end everyone around her was greatly alarmed. She had associations with criminals and then she got killed ...

Mr. Simpson should never have been arrested. I blame his alleged ‘dream-team' of lawyers. Bob Shapiro asking him if he did it; I would have fired him straight away. Telling him “You have to turn yourself in, an hour from now” is like your doctor telling you that you have one hour left to live. I think they could have proved him innocent many times over but it seems they all thought he was guilty, stirred up by the media ... Why didn't they get the records of Nicole Browns' last phone call, which might have given him a watertight alibi?

This is where the story ends. Now I'll move to the deeper, fictional level, where this book tells you the story of the Fall. For that, I must first say something about the meaning of that word.

The origin of evil

Most people in the western world are Darwinists. What has always puzzled me is that so many of them seem to think that evil is part of human nature. Most forms of evil have a negative effect on the chances of survival of all parties involved, so it's not very likely that they could survive an evolutionary process. And when they assume that morality is a social invention ... do they really believe that society can create new feelings, like guilt, moral indignation, thirst for revenge?

But biologists in general fail to give you an acceptable explanation for mental human properties. So I will start out with a Darwinist explanation of morality.

The origin of ethics

When animals want to organize themselves all they can think of is following a leader. Once a species has come into being that has developed a high enough level of communication so as to make it possible for individuals to make plans together, a far better organization model comes in sight. The group will have the best chances of survival if everybody's interest is taken equally into account. So a very strong instinct developed to see an equal in everyone you get in touch with; a sense of moral indignation when another fails to treat another as an equal; a sense of guilt when you realize you did that; and the thirst for revenge when a person fails to see it, the “an eye for a eye” principal forcing people in the position of the victim when they have failed to imagine themselves in that position.

It seems a watertight system but something must have gone wrong ... No theory explaining human properties can do without a variety of the story of the Fall.

The Fall

We have to teach our children the knowledge of good and evil (or “values”, as it's called nowadays), parents say. So they must have learned that from their parents, and they from theirs and so on ... So where did Adam and Eve get this knowledge? I don't know, it must have been growing on a tree or something ...

This must have been the starting point of the story of the Fall in the bible. There is only one way to teach your children the knowledge of good and evil: by making them feel guilty when they did something bad. They never do anything bad. Morality is part of human nature, but children have a development program, which includes the development of morality; you cannot expect the same social behavior from a child as from an adult. Interpreting children's behavior as bad is always misinterpretation. Original sin is making a child confess to a crime it hasn't committed.

The Fall is something that happens to practically everyone in this world, but not all people sell their souls to the devil by giving up on the principle of equality. In the bible the story is written with the pen of the devil, demonstrating the properties of the evil that is the result of that, sexism, inconsistency, absence of imagination ... incapacity to love.

Oscar Wilde tells the story again in “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and again the story is told, for a large part, with the voice of the devil. It's the analysis of evil, but the Fall itself is only referred to, as it happened when Dorian was a child.

You can see “If I Did It” as complementary to that, as it's only about the Fall itself.

“If I did it”: The Fall of “O.J.”

For years “O.J.” has tried to convince people he is not a murderer.

Now he has this idea that he might prove his innocence scientifically, by working out the alternative hypothesis in a book ... With this idea he goes to a publisher who reacts enthusiastically, gives him a contract and an advance payment, and makes arrangements to hire him a ghostwriter.

Some time later “O.J.” comes to the conclusion that his idea might have seemed very good in the abstract, but cannot be worked out in practice. So he goes back to the publisher and says he wants to write a different book, about his relationship with the character “Nicole”; she says that is O.K., as long as he puts in that confession; as he finds out now that that is how she interpreted his hypothesis story. He protests, but it seems he has some kind of a contractual obligation to confess to a double murder ...

By sheer coincidence the ghostwriter happens to be someone who testified against him in court. Now the publisher gives this ghostwriter the assignment to make sure “O.J.” puts in that confession.

This is not a very likely story; like I say, it's fiction.

At the beginning of the book “O.J.” is someone who has escaped from the Fall. “Nicole” regularly accuses him of all kinds of things but as these are in general rather absurd this has no effect. It seems she doesn't really want to be taken seriously ... But in 1989 it goes wrong. In the eyes of the world his pleading “no contest” in that trial was a confession.

Still, he doesn't make a big deal out of it. Later “Nicole” says this has been the turning point in their marriage ... you could say it was the beginning of his downfall.

But when the story reaches 1994 the devil comes into action. He wants for him now to confess to a brutal double murder. “O.J.” is put under terrible pressure and when he starts to cave in the author, playing the part of his subconscious, reminds him of how, as an adolescent, he liberated himself from the effects of original sin – does he want to surrender now?

“O.J.” never really understood what he was doing back then, he didn't know his motives, so whether this warning helped I don't know. He does tell the story but the devil cannot make him leave out “keep in mind, this is hypothetical” and he puts in a lot of impossible things; but he knows people will take it as a confession anyway.

So now “O.J.” starts to play the murderer ““O.J.””. He tries to work him self up to a state of anger, and give himself a somewhat plausible motive. Some of that anger, I suppose, is “O.J.”'s own anger about being forced to confess, you can feel the pressure he is under.

“Acting is re-acting” as Rod Steiger said, and here you see what Mr. Fenjves' most important function has been.

But when it comes to actually committing the crime, “O.J.” cannot make ““O.J.”” do it. Unlike the guy playing him he is not such a great actor, he cannot make ““O.J.”” that different from himself; moreover, I don't think he wants to give a detailed description of that crime. So you get the before and the after the event, but not the event itself.

All this is exactly as it should be, as the Fall is now something that happens on two levels at the same time. To “O.J.” for whom this is the confession and to ““O.J.”” who is innocent one moment and finds himself covered with blood the next, two dead bodies laying on the ground, and he doesn't know what happened ... So it hits you twice, in two ways, at the same time. This is the most shocking thing I ever read. It's absolutely horrible.

Gradually “O.J.” returns to reality and the fantasy story ends with “The last hour was just a nightmare.” It's over.

But the real nightmare has yet to begin and it is a gruesome nightmare. The amazing thing is that now everything that happens after the murders feels as the result of the confession: the consequences of the Fall. As “O.J.” is locked up in the end it's the locking up of a person's soul.

It was a simplification to say that on the superficial level it's a real story and on the deeper level it's fiction. The confession is of course a fictional story and the fact that Mr. Simpson would somehow have been forced to tell it is not true either; that play was carefully planned. The story “O.J.” tells about his life is some kind of half-fiction, as he is not for real and the events that are told are selected to fit into the story. But then the real world seriously enters into it when you get real documentation, a letter, a transcript of a 911 call ... and in the end you step out in the cold, harsh reality with the transcript of that interrogation. The effect is that it seems that the real world flows into it, the story of the fall becomes the story of his life and, in the end, the story of mankind.

Part III. The consequences of the Fall.

This we hold for self-evident, that all human beings are equal by nature. That is the fundament of all ethics.

As you see an equal in everyone you get in touch with it seems people will in general keep to this rule automatically. But children live in a different world and speak a different language, so maybe it all started with child neglect, parents not knowing their children well enough to understand them ...

And then they think children are not real people, and there is something wrong with them, and the properties of a child are bad and should be got rid of and replaced by adult properties, and so they punish their children for being children. So this would be the oldest form of fascism: despise for children. (The relationship between children and adults is asymmetrical, but that doesn't mean they are not equals.)

It doesn't stop there. It's not for no good reason that in Genesis those fig-leaves come right after the Fall. When children have learned that all kinds of bad impulses come out of their subconscious minds, like something evil is living in there, how are they going to explain their first sexual fantasies? It's very likely that they don't dare to think about them, and completely misinterpret them. I suppose this is the cause of sexism, men assuming that women have no honor, no self-respect, no human dignity ... they are Untermenschen, sub-humans.

Here a problem arises. How to avoid getting in touch with them and seeing them as equals? Several solutions have been found. In some cultures men and women live in separate worlds and women are not allowed to show there faces in public. In Western civilization women are taught to parade around as decorative and/or sexual objects, plastic smiles on rubber faces, their breasts peeping out of their dresses like a baby's behind ... Thus teaching little boys that women have no honor and little girls to make themselves blind for the meaning of it. Yet nature often proves stronger then culture and many man feel the need to constantly prove their superiority by insulting women, using sex as an expression of despise and beating women up.

Of course it is all a bit more complicated then this. Not everybody despises children, not all men are sexist. I would say you can split up mankind in two parts: those who have sold their souls to the devil by giving up on the principal of equality, defining parts of the population as inferior, and those who haven't. The first category I will call the indecent, the other the decent. The Fall is something that happens to practically everyone, one way or the other, we all looked up one day to find ourselves covered with blood, not knowing what happened ... But we haven't all sold our souls to the devil. I don't know why some do and some don't, it depends, I suppose, on many factors.

As we all know, it didn't end here, as it does in Genesis. That story ends with all women being decent and all men sexist, so that women love men but men can't love women. In a one-sided love relationship the one who doesn't love rules and thinks it's natural, for those who have no love mistake it for servility. It's written with the pen of the devil so it's called a punishment: the subhumans are always blamed themselves for the crimes committed against them.

The only thing that can make a person feel inferior is guilt, for having treated somebody as inferior; nature's punishment is that you now feel inferior yourself, a very unpleasant feeling that you can only cure by making up and restoring equality. It may seem there are other inferior properties but I don't think that is really true. When you feel inferior for being, for example, stupid, you feel that it's your own fault and that you are insulting other people with it.

Original sin has planted the great fear for guilt into everybody. The misinterpretation of children's behavior creates ugly images of them. Those images turn into demons that people constantly try to fight of, to prove to themselves and others that they are not like that at all. One way to do that is to show your despise for people who represent that demon. This is a bit risky, for if it is a false accusation you make yourself guilty, you create a bad image of yourself.

So those subhumans are very useful, you can project all your demons upon them without risk, they are supposed to have no honor and no human feelings.

Therefore many other categories have been classified as subhuman, based on class, race, religion, nationality and so on. But also in individual relationships a person may be so classified, often one child in a family takes in that position; people can play the one part in one relationship and the other part in another; sometimes it's even reciprocal.

Evil is made out of paradoxes, the snake biting its own tail: for the sake of being seen as a good person, someone who always treats everybody as equal, people start classifying a part of the population as intrinsically inferior. The fear for guilt is the cause of the holocaust.

But now, with those subhumans everywhere, avoiding getting in touch with them on a deeper level needs more then burka's and Botox. The indecent must develop devices to block out human expression.

Many of such devices have been developed. They are used selectively, but many have blocked out every one at a deeper level, so that they have lost the capacity to love. These are the people who have no higher goals in life than to prove their superiority, everything circles around power, status, money and expressing their despise for inferior people. They are the people who enjoy witch-hunting. As most of the positions of power are taken in by those who are most hungry for it, those people form the most powerful class.

In 1956 Elvis Presley's TV-appearances made him the most popular artist of all times practically overnight. I saw them many years later and was amazed. He used means of expression I didn't know existed and didn't know I could read; he broke down and rebuilt the universe.

They wrote in the papers he was making howling and growling noises and grimaces. Of course those people didn't know they had everything distorted, that they were looking with an evil eye and listening with an evil ear; they thought everybody observed the same. “It must be something sexual” they said. It's what witch-hunters always say about emotions they don't understand, which are almost all human emotions. For Elvis Presley was the target of a witch-hunt too, like Oscar Wilde and O.J. Simpson.

In 1995 we saw O.J. Simpson on Dutch TV for the first time, they showed his reaction for five seconds in the news after they said “not guilty”. (Before the trial nobody had heard of him and it is illegal to expose a defendant.) I thought “that seems really a very nice person; I can't imagine it's a murderer”. My friend saw the news too and thought the same. But it's exactly those five seconds they all show on the internet: look, what a monster. I thought they had everything distorted again, but there are other possibilities. Oprah Winfrey showed a boy who was classified as abnormal. You saw him coming home, his mother had put some food on the table, she grabbed him by his shoulders and pushed him towards the table: “Sit! Eat!” He got angry and Oprah and her audience all went “Ooh! What an impossible boy!” The subhumans are supposed to have no feelings, no honor, you cannot insult them ... So I realized that my friend and I automatically took into account that if they would have said “guilty” the consequences would have been horrible and that he knew all the world was watching. The witch-hunters don't do that. So it can work two ways: you don't put yourself in somebody's place because you don't read his expressions or you can't read them because you don't put yourself in his place.

There are other possibilities. In some interviews with Mr. Simpson, at a certain point, the interviewer just didn't hear a single word he said anymore.

There is one other motive for classifying people as subhuman: innocence. I suppose people cannot accept to see an innocence in somebody else that they have lost themselves – nobody is to escape from the Fall.

In 1960 6 year old Ruby Bridges went to a white school and people were standing at the side doing the most vicious name-calling and threatening. She said later that for a long time she didn't know it was because she was black. I don't think it was. Racism was the justification, but innocence the motive. Many parents try to avoid original sin, which is not so easy as you might pass on your own fears without knowing it. But when they succeed there is a good chance that at school such a child will become the target of the class or the teacher. In the latter case, as the teacher doesn't see the behavior of that child as reactions to the abuse, the child might be classified as abnormal and put on hard drugs like Ritalin.

There are very few adults who have escaped completely. Those who have will be great artists as they haven't learned to suppress their expressions, they have no demons they are afraid to evoke. Very likely they will become the targets of general witch-hunting.

No one is to escape. Confess, confess, confess! In most interviews with Mr. Simpson they asked him, sometimes three times: did you do it? If he doesn't confess to murder or abuse then let him at least confess to something else, using drugs, fraud, whatever ... So Mr. Simpson could be absolutely sure that Mr. Fenjves would brag in the media about how he made him confess ... there was no risk that that part of the story wouldn't be told.

For the rest, of course, he became the national super-subhuman, all the sins of the world being projected upon him, all people's demons and enemies. They get together on a regular basis to cry “Monster! Monster! Monster!” and feel very good about themselves, not knowing that their monsters are their own produce and that they are not even shouting at the same monster. He has become a blank projection screen.

As a murderer is for few people really an enemy or demon they are obsessed with, those murders serve mainly as a justification, and as a weapon. None of the other crimes he has been accused of ever really happened.

In fact, with every gesture they make and every word they say they demonstrate they know very well he is not a criminal. A criminal you don't want to call by his first name, you don't want to accuse him of all and everything, you don't want to talk about him all the time, follow him around where ever he goes, you don't want to know everything about his private life, you don't want to lie about him, you don't want to own his personal possessions, you don't want to use him for entertainment, you don't want to erase his name from his book and put your own in its place ... you don't want to rape him. They made a clip consisting of a sequence of his facial expressions and broadcasted that on CNN, which is not just the rape of an individual, it's raping humanity. They hate human expression ...

All the efforts people have made over the years to prove him innocent are useless. He has been proved innocent of those murders many times over and there is a lot of evidence, including the statements of many experts that have been analyzing him, that makes it very unlikely that he ever abused anyone, but it makes no difference. The witch-hunters don't dare to have any judgment of their own, they only go on authority, and in general that is the authority of what they perceive as public opinion. “They all say it” decides what is true and what not, “they all do it” what is right and what is wrong. They believe their own lies when the others parrot them. So when they want something to be true they let “they all say it” make “they all say it” true". The first things they would want to lie about are those polls and that is exactly what they did.

Everyone, friend or enemy, who has ever been out with him in a public place tells you the same: he is always followed around by supporters. I give you two examples out of many:

You've probably heard O.J. say in interviews that people continually come up to him and express their support. I initially dismissed that as wishful thinking, especially given the general public's overall views on the criminal trial verdict. It didn't make any sense.
I can tell you now that it's true. After both spending time with O.J. in public and speaking with his friends and confidants, it's blatantly obvious. During the time I spent with him, O.J. never got a negative reception. As one of Simpson's friends said, "Maybe one out of every 200 times he goes out." It didn't matter whether the person was young, old, male, or female, the reactions were all similar. People would approach and extend a hand, convey their support and ask how his two children were doing.
Graham Bensinger in a comment on his interview with O.J. Simpson

I walked him down the corridor and we got into the elevator. There was a guy inside on his cell phone, and his eyes went wide with surprise. “Holy shit!” he said. “I'm in an elevator with O.J. Simpson. I'll have to call you back.” He reached for O.J.'s hand, grinning ear to ear, and O.J. took it. When we got to the lobby, there was more of the same. People turned to stare, but there was no horror in their looks, no disgust, no judgment. A young couple came over and asked O.J. if he'd pose for a picture, then handed me a camera and had me do the honors. It wasn't the only time this happened.

Pablo Fenjves in ‘Prologue'

So, in fact, a very large part of the population supports him. But the existence of these people is denied, they have practically no access to the media anymore, they are made mute and invisible. There is something like a civil war going on, it's the war between good and evil, but the good guys have no power, although they are probably not outnumbered by the bad guys. As “O.J.” says himself: “Half of you think I did it, and nothing will ever make you change your minds. The other half know I didn't do it, and all evidence in the world — planted or otherwise — isn't going to sway you, either.”

That's the way it is. The witch-hunters are just incapable of keeping the possibility open he is innocent; whereas the decent people base their opinions on observation and logic and their capacity to learn to know a person, and when they know the truth they are not going to believe a lie. Every argument between the two parties is useless.

The supporters of O.J. Simpson live in enemy territory, and they have no defense. The witch-hunters must have classified all supporters as subhumans, as their feelings are never taken into account, not even the feelings of those two children who lost their mother when they were 5 and 8 years old and have been severely mentally abused by them ever since. When Judge Judy called a mother a "moron" in the presence of her child, people called that child abuse, and they were right. Do they think those children never watched TV or glanced at a magazine?

I set out to give an overview of the psychology of evil in a few pages but obviously I can't do it. It all starts simple enough, a child is forced to confess to a crime it didn't commit, but the mental diseases that are caused by that are too numerous and gruesome for me to analyze. What are the motives of a rapist? I don't know and I don't care. I'm fed up with it. I started to do the internet research on O.J. Simpson after they sent him to prison; before that I had hardly been confronted with this witch-hunt. It's a trip to hell. I can only do it for 5-10 minutes at the time, after that I'm so furious that I feel like killing people. The stupidity of those lies, the anti-logic, the ugliness, the glorification of indecency ... all with that air of moral superiority that is the devil's trademark. It makes me too sick.

But there is one important subject I have yet to discuss.

A man abuses his wife. He might have the same motives as Nicole Brown, but suppose he is motivated by despise for women, like, I think, most wife-beaters. So after a few years of marriage, in spite of all the devices he has developed to keep her mentally at a distance, she is getting to close and he hits her. It's a pattern. Half a year later he does it again and then those incidents become more and more frequent and serious. For a long time his wife has shifted it all aside as not belonging to her real life and to who he really is, but the moment arrives when she can't do that anymore and she breaks up with him. Then all she has shifted aside comes up and she starts rewriting history ... why did she put up with that? “You thought you deserved it” says Oprah Winfrey, “you had a very low self-esteem ...” It's the mother of all demons: the slave-soul. The slave-soul is a creature without self-respect, she is inferior by nature and accepts it. It doesn't exist. None of those demons really exist, but they rule the world.

“At times I have felt like a battered husband or boyfriend but I loved her” says Mr. Simpson. He is not afraid of demons, he knows they don't exist. For in the end people are not just afraid to be seen as a demon; they are afraid to be it.

The wife-beater wakes up a demon that came into being years before. Children cannot help loving their parents. To be despised by someone you love creates that demon, it's the worst humiliation in the world. In Oscar Wilde's play, Salomé loves Jokanaan who despises her; she wants his head in a silver charger. (Of course the witch-hunters called that play erotic; they don't understand it, so “it must be something sexual” ...) Wilde wrote that play in French to have it translated into English by his friend Alfred Douglas, who intensely hated his father. He probably hoped Douglas would recognize himself in Salomé and his father in Jokanaan.

When they made you look like a slave-soul, you want it turned around, the master becoming the slave. That is easier said then done, you have to see someone you have respected for a long time as a subhuman; you don't know how to do it. So, if the mountain will not come to Mohammed ... You project the enemy on the subhuman and go after him.

So that 1989 verdict might have had a lot to do with the witch-hunt. Of course Marcia Clark knew he didn't kill anybody, but she wanted his head in a silver charger. Of course Jackie Glass knew he never robbed anybody but she managed to practically literally turn him into a slave.

He made an incredible performance out of it, demonstrating that the only thing that is wrong with a slave is his position, not who he is; he is as great and beautiful as the sun. If you want to see a monster you have to look in the other direction, to the person behind that table ... the slave owner.

Thus the story of O.J. Simpson's life has become the history of mankind. But I must admit that as for now I don't care much about mankind. I care for a completely innocent person who has been sent to a horrible place. I want for him to be released, rehabilitated, to get his possessions back, his money back, his copyright back and his human rights back.

That he might not win the appeal I don't dare to imagine.

Authors Website: www.countermovement.net

Authors Bio:
I am a Dutch woman. I was born in 1947.