Ben
het niet helemaal eens met de kop, daar er in feite geen neo-fascisme
bestaat*, het is dezelfde schoftenideologie die eerder zovelen heeft
getroffen, zowel in Europa, als in Latijns-Amerika en in de VS (de
McCarthy jaren en de toestand zoals die nu is onder Trump, al
‘moet’ het fascisme daar nog verder groeien)………
Pepe
Escobar de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel, eerder
geplaatst op Consortium News (een onderdeel van Anti-Media), stelt dat de verkiezingen in Brazilië bepalend zijn voor
het groeiende fascisme in de rest van het westen, waar ik zojuist de
VS al noemde.
Latuff destaca a queda de braço entre a democracia e a extrema direita – Brasil 247 http://www.brasil247.com/pt/247/midiatech/371529/Latuff-destaca-a-queda-de-bra%C3%A7o-entre-a-democracia-e-a-extrema-direita.htm … via @GoogleNews
Latuff highlights the arm drop between democracy and the extreme Right-brazil 247 http://www.brasil247.com/pt/247/midiatech/371529/Latuff-destaca-a-queda-de-bra%C3%A7o-entre-a-democracia-e-a-extrema-direita.htm … via @GoogleNews
De
linkse partijen in het westen en in Latijns Amerika hebben voor een
groot deel hun hand overspeeld met vernieuwingen, die het linkse
ideaal de nek hebben omgedraaid, neem de PvdA die onder de
exorbitante zelfverrijker Kok de links-ideale veren afschudde.
Veel
van deze partijen hebben om mee te kunnen regeren, hun idealen in de
koelkast gezet, waar ze de neoliberale ideeën hebben omarmd, of waar
ze de grootste regeringspartij waren, zich niet langer hebben ingezet
voor de doelgroep die hen ooit groot heeft gemaakt……. Ofwel deze ‘linkse partijen’ hebben de grote
onderlaag en allen die weinig kansen hebben in de maatschappij, zoals
invaliden, chronisch zieken en in feite de ouderen, in de steek gelaten……
De onderlaag van wie het
grootste deel tegen, op of onder de armoedegrens moet leven (dat is drie keer in armoede leven en dat voor rond de 4 miljoen mensen, inclusief hun kinderen!), veelal werkloos is, of veel te weinig verdient en in te
dure huurwoningen leeft…… Wat betreft de ouderen: in tegenstelling tot
wat men continu durft te verkondigen, dat ouderen welgestelde
uitvreters zijn, leeft een groot aantal van hen in armoede, zo hebben veel van deze ouderen de huishoudelijke hulp afgezegd, daar ze de eigen bijdrage niet meer kunnen betalen, gevolg: ouderen vervuilen of ze zijn intussen al helemaal vervuild en zijn verder vereenzaamd…. De vermaledijde ‘participatiemaatschappij’ bestaat niet eens voor het overgrote deel van deze groep….. (het hele ‘participatiemaatschappij’ idee is niet anders dan een smerige bezuiniging, deze maatschappij bestaat dan ook niet en zal nooit bestaan, anders dan mensen die zich altijd al hebben ingezet voor mensen die geen of minder kansen hebben dan anderen)
Het
voorgaande, dus wat betreft de linkse partijen, geldt bepaald niet alleen voor Nederland, maar ook voor
landen als Australië en voor een groot deel van de EU landen, plus uiteraard een aantal Latijns-Amerikaanse landen…… In de VS bestaat er geen socialistisch of sociaaldemocratisch alternatief op het niveau van de twee grootste partijen, die nog amper verschillen van elkaar….
Zoals
al vaker hier gesteld: het fascisme is flink groeiend in de EU,
hoewel men het na de meeste verkiezingen uitkraait van genot als men
stelt dat de extreem rechtse, ofwel fascistische partijen, niet de
grootste partij (of zoals in Nederland: beweging >> PVV) zijn
geworden, vergeet men voor het gemak dat deze partijen (behalve Ukip in GB) bij elke verkiezing groter worden….. (terwijl ze al een fiks aantal kiezers hebben……)
De
gevoerde neoliberale politiek in westerse landen zorgt ervoor dat de
grote onderlaag en allen die weinig of geen kans hebben, zich meer en
meer uitspreken voor fascistische partijen of bewegingen……. Uiteraard is dit het gevolg van leugens die figuren als Wilders (en Trump) hen op de mouw spelden, als zouden zij zich wel voor deze vergeten groepen inzetten……..
We
hebben in de 20er en 30er jaren van de vorige eeuw gezien waar het
voorgaande toe kan leiden en toch trapt er niemand op de rem…..
Integendeel men probeert de fascisten de wind uit de zeilen te halen
door rechtse stokpaarden over te nemen en zich bijvoorbeeld uit te
spreken tegen vluchtelingen…..
Terwijl de oorzaken voor dat vluchten
door het westen zijn gecreëerd met economisch afknijpen van
ontwikkelingslanden (gesubsidieerde dumping van westerse goederen
zoals groente, vis en vlees), echter erger nog zijn de illegale oorlogen die
het westen o.l.v. de VS voert in landen waar het niets te zoeken heeft, of door
regeringen omver te werpen door de VS middels door de CIA en/of NSA georganiseerde opstanden…… (het liefst in combinatie met economische oorlogvoering, door blokkades op de invoer van levensmiddelen en medicijnen, zoals we dat nu in Jemen, Venezuela en meer en meer in Iran zien…..) Vooral de illegale oorlogen van de VS zijn de grootste oorzaak van de enorme vluchtelingenstromen…..
Lees
het volgend uitstekende artikel van Escobar en geeft het door, het is
de hoogste tijd dat men ontwaakt uit de consumptiecoma en ziet welk duistere gevaar op ons afkomt, een fascistische EU, of zoals Escobar het noemt een Unie van Europese (fascistische) Staten:
Future
of Western Democracy Being Played Out in Brazil
October
9, 2018 at 9:48 pm
Written
by Consortium
News
Stripped
to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a
direct clash between democracy and an early 21st Century
neofascism, indeed between civilization and barbarism.
(CN Op-ed) — Nothing
less than the future of politics across the West – and across the
Global South – is being played out in Brazil.
Stripped
to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a
direct clash between democracy and an early 21st Century,
neofascism, indeed between civilization and barbarism.
Geopolitical
and global economic reverberations will be immense. The Brazilian
dilemma illuminates all the contradictions surrounding the Right
populist offensive across the West, juxtaposed to the inexorable
collapse of the Left. The stakes could not be higher.
Jair
Bolsonaro, an outright supporter of Brazilian military dictatorships
of last century, who has been normalized as the “extreme-right
candidate,” won the first round of the presidential elections on
Sunday with more than 49 million votes. That was 46 percent of the
total, just shy of a majority needed for an outright win. This in
itself is a jaw-dropping development.
His
opponent, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party (PT), got only 31
million votes, or 29 percent of the total. He will now face Bolsonaro
in a runoff on October 28. A Sisyphean task awaits Haddad: just
to reach parity with Bolsonaro, he needs every single vote from those
who supported the third and fourth-placed candidates, plus a
substantial share of the almost 20 percent of votes considered null
and void.
Meanwhile,
no less than 69 percent of Brazilians, according to the latest polls,
profess their support for democracy. That means 31 percent do not.
No
Tropical Trump
Dystopia
Central does not even begin to qualify it. Progressive Brazilians are
terrified of facing a mutant “Brazil” (the movie) cum Mad Max
wasteland ravaged by evangelical fanatics, rapacious neoliberal
casino capitalists and a rabid military bent on recreating a
Dictatorship 2.0.
Bolsonaro:
Danger for Brazil.
Bolsonaro,
a former paratrooper, is being depicted by Western mainstream
media essentially as the Tropical Trump. The facts are way more
complex.
Bolsonaro,
a mediocre member of Congress for 27 years with no highlights on his
C.V., indiscriminately demonizes blacks, the LGBT community, the Left
as a whole, the environment “scam” and most of all, the poor.
He’s avowedly pro-torture. He markets himself as a Messiah –
a fatalistic avatar coming to “save” Brazil from all those “sins”
above.
The
Goddess of the Market, predictably, embraces him. “Investors” –
those semi-divine entities – deem him good for “the market”,
with his last-minute offensive in the polls mirroring a rally in
the Brazilianreal and
the Sao Paulo stock exchange.
Bolsonaro
may be your classic extreme-right “savior” in the Nazi mould. He
may embody Right populism to the core. But he’s definitely not a
“sovereignist” – the motto of choice in political debate across
the West. His “sovereign” Brazil would be run more like a
retro-military dictatorship totally subordinated to Washington’s
whims.
Bolsonaro’s
ticket is compounded by a barely literate, retired general as his
running mate, a man who is ashamed of his mixed race background and
is frankly pro-eugenics. General Antonio Hamilton Mourão has
even revived the
idea of a military coup.
Manipulating
the ticket, we find massive economic interests, tied to mineral
wealth, agro-business and most of all the Brazilian Bible Belt. It is
complete with death squads against Native Brazilians, landless
peasants and African-American communities. It is a haven for the
weapons industry. Call it the apotheosis of tropical neo-pentecostal,
Christian-Zionism.
Praise
the Lord
Brazil
has 42 million evangelicals – and over 200 representatives in both
branches of Parliament. Don’t mess with their jihad.
They know how to exercise massive appeal among the beggars at the
neoliberal banquet. The Lula Left
simply didn’t know how to seduce them.
So
even with echoes of Mike Pence, Bolsonaro is the Brazilian Trump only
to a certain extent: his communication skills – talking tough,
simplistically, is language understandable to a seven-year old.
Educated Italians compare him to Matteo Salvini, the Lega leader, now
Minister of Interior. But that’s also not exactly the case.
Bolsonaro
is a symptom of a much larger disease. He has only reached this
level, a head-to-head in the second round against Lula’s candidate
Haddad, because of a sophisticated, rolling, multi-stage,
judicial/congressional/business/media Hybrid War unleashed on Brazil.
Way
more complex than any color revolution, Hybrid War in Brazil featured
a law-fare coup under cover of the Car
Wash anti-corruption
investigation. That led to the impeachment of President Dilma
Rousseff and Lula being thrown in jail on corruption charges with no
hard evidence or smoking gun.
In
every poll Lula would win these elections hand down. The coup
plotters managed to imprison him and prevent him from running. Lula’s
right to run was highlighted by everyone from Pope Francis to the
UN’s Human Rights Council, as well as Noam Chomsky. Yet in a
delightful historical twist, the coup plotters’ scenario blew up in
their faces as the front-runner to lead the country is not one of
them, but a neofascist.
“One
of them” would ideally be a faceless bureaucrat affiliated with the
former social democrats, the PSDB, turned hardcore neoliberals
addicted to posing as Center Left when they are the “acceptable”
face of the neoliberal Right. Call them Brazilian Tony Blairs.
Specific Brazilian contradictions, plus the advance of Right populism
across the West, led to their downfall.
Even
Wall Street and the City of London (which endorsed Hybrid War on
Brazil after it was unleashed by NSA
spying of
oil giant Petrobras) have started entertaining second thoughts on
supporting Bolsonaro for president of a BRICS nation, which is a
leader of the Global South, and until a few years ago, was on its way
to becoming the fifth largest economy in the world.
It
all hangs on the “vote transfer” mechanism from Lula to Haddad
and the creation of a serious, multi-party Progressive Democratic
Front on the second round to defeat the rising neofascism.
They
have less than three weeks to pull it off.
The
Bannon Effect
It’s
no secret that Steve Bannon is advising the Bolsonaro campaign in
Brazil. One of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo, met with Bannon in New
York two months ago after which the Bolsonaro camp decided to profit
from Bannon’s supposed “peerless” social engineering insights.
Bannon:
Danger for Europe.
Bolsonaro’s
son tweeted at the time, “We’re certainly in touch to join
forces, especially against Cultural Marxism.” That was followed by
an army of bots disgorging an avalanche of fake news up to Election
Day.
A
specter haunts Europe. Its name is Steve Bannon. The specter has
moved on to the tropics.
In
Europe, Bannon is now poised to intervene like an angel of doom in a
Tintoretto painting heralding the creation of a EU-wide Right
Populist coalition.
Bannon
is notoriously praised to high heavens by Italian Interior Minister
Salvini; Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban; Dutch nationalist
Geert Wilders; and scourge of the Paris establishment, Marine Le Pen.
Last
month, Bannon set up The Movement; at first sight just a political
start-up in Brussels with a very small staff. But talk about
Boundless Ambition: their aim is no less than turning the European
parliamentary elections in May 2019 upside down.
The
European parliament in Strasbourg – a bastion of bureaucratic
inefficiency – is not exactly a household name across the EU. The
parliament is barred from proposing legislation. Laws and budgets can
only be blocked via a majority vote.
Bannon
aims at capturing at least one-third of the seats in Strasbourg. He’s
bound to apply tested American-style methods such as intensive
polling, data analysis, and intensive social media campaigns – much
the same as in Bolsonaro’s case. But there’s no guarantee it will
work, of course.
The
foundation stone of The Movement was arguably laid in two key
meetings in early September set up by Bannon and his right-hand man,
Mischael Modrikamen, chairman of the quite small Belgian Parti
Populaire (PP). The first meeting was in Rome with Salvini and the
second in Belgrade with Orban.
Modrikamen
defines the concept as a “club” which will “collect funds
from donors, in America and Europe, to make sure
‘populist’ ideas can be heard by the citizens of Europe
who perceive more and more that Europe is not a democracy anymore.”
Modrikamen
insists, “We are all sovereignists.” The Movement will
hammer four themes that seem to form a consensus among disparate,
EU-wide political parties: against “uncontrolled immigration”;
against “Islamism”; favoring “security” across the EU;
and supporting “a Europe of sovereign nations, proud of their
identity.”
The
Movement should really pick up speed after next month’s midterms in
the U.S. In theory, it could congregate different parties from the
same nation under its umbrella. That could be a very tall order, even
taller than the fact key political actors already have divergent
agendas.
Wilders
wants to blow up the EU. Salvini and Orban want a weak EU but they
don’t want to get rid of its institutions. Le Pen wants a EU reform
followed by a “Frexit” referendum.
The
only themes that unite this mixed Right Populism bag are nationalism,
a fuzzy anti-establishment drive and a – quite popular – disgust
with the EU’s overwhelming bureaucratic machine.
Here
we find some common ground with Bolsonaro, who poses as a nationalist
and as against the Brazilian political system – even though he’s
been in Parliament for ages.
There’s
no rational explanation for Bolsonaro’s last-minute surge among two
sections of the Brazilian electorate that deeply despise him: women
and the Northeast region, which has always been discriminated against
by the wealthier South and Southeast.
Much
like Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. election, Bolsonaro’s
campaign targeted undecided voters in Northeastern states, as well as
women voters, with a barrage of fake news demonizing Haddad and the
Workers’ Party. It worked like a charm.
The
Italian Job
I’ve
just been to northern Italy checking out how popular Salvini really
is. Salvini defines the May 2019 European Parliament elections as
“the last chance for Europe.” Italian Foreign Minister Enzo
Moavero sees them as the first “real election for the future of
Europe.” Bannon also sees the future of Europe being played in
Italy.
It’s
quite something to seize the conflicting energy in the air in Milan,
where Salvini’s Lega is quite popular while at the same time Milan
is a globalized city crammed with ultra-progressive pockets.
At
a political debate about a book published by the Bruno Leoni
Institute regarding exiting the euro, Roberto Maroni, a former
governor of the powerful Lombardia region, remarked: “Italexit is
outside of the formal agenda of the government, of the Lega and of
the center-right.” Maroni should know, after all he was one of the
Lega’s founders.
He
hinted however that major changes are on the horizon. “To form a
group in the European parliament, the numbers are important. This is
the moment to show up with a unique symbol among parties of many
nations.”
It’s
not only Bannon and The Movement’s Modrikamen. Salvini, Le Pen and
Orban are convinced they can win the 2019 elections – with the EU
transformed into a “Union of European Nations.”
This
would include not just a couple of big cities where all the action
is, with the rest reduced to fly over status. Right Populism argues
that France, Italy, Spain, and Greece are no longer nations – only
mere provinces.
Macron:
Perfect “progressive” wolf to be released among the sheep.
Right
Populism derives immense satisfaction that its main enemy is the
self-described “Jupiter” Macron – mocked across France by some
as the “Little Sun King.” President Emmanuel Macron must be
terrified that Salvini is emerging as the “leading light” of
European nationalists.
This
is what Europe seems to be coming to: a trashy, Salvini vs. Macron
cage match.
Arguably
the Salvini vs. Macron fight in Europe might be replicated as
Bolsonaro vs. Haddad in Brazil. Some sharp Brazilian minds are
convinced Haddad is the Brazilian Macron.
In
my view he is not. His has a background in philosophy and he’s a
former, competent mayor of Sao Paulo, one of the most complex
megalopolises on the planet. Macron is a Rothschild mergers and
acquisitions banker. Unlike Macron, who was engineered by the French
establishment as the perfect “progressive” wolf to be released
among the sheep, Haddad embodies what’s left of really progressive
Left.
On
top of that – unlike virtually the whole Brazilian political
spectrum – Haddad is not corrupt. He’d have to offer the
requisite pound of flesh to the usual suspects if he wins of course.
But he’s not out to be their puppet.
Compare
Bolsonaro’s Trumpism, apparent in his last-minute message before
Election Day: “Make Brazil Great Again,” with Trump’s Trumpism.
Bolsonaro’s
tools are unmitigated praise of the Motherland; the Armed Forces; and
the flag.
But
Bolsonaro is not interested in defending Brazilian industry, jobs and
culture. On the contrary. A graphic example is what happened in a
Brazilian restaurant in Deerfield Beach, Florida, a year ago:
Bolsonaro saluted the American flag and chanted “USA! USA!”
That’s
undiluted MAGA – without a “B”.
Jason
Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How
Fascism Works,
takes us further. Stanley
stresses how “the idea in fascism is to destroy economic politics…
The corporatists side with politicians who use fascist tactics
because they are trying to divert people’s attention from the real
forces that cause the genuine anxiety they feel.”
Bolsonaro
has mastered these diversionist tactics. And he excels in demonizing
so-called Cultural Marxism. Bolsonaro fits Stanley’s description as
applied to the U.S.:
“Liberalism
and Cultural Marxism destroyed our supremacy and destroyed this
wonderful past where we ruled and our cultural traditions were the
ones that dominated. And then it militarizes the feeling of
nostalgia. All the anxiety and loss that people feel in their lives,
say from the loss of their healthcare, the loss of their pensions,
the loss of their stability, then gets rerouted into a sense that the
real enemy is liberalism, which led to the loss of this mythic past.”
In
the Brazilian case, the enemy is not liberalism but the Workers’
Party, derided by Bolsonaro as “a bunch of communists.”
Celebrating his astonishing first round victory, he said Brazil was
on the edge of a corrupt, communist “abyss” and could either
choose a path of “prosperity, freedom, family” or “the path of
Venezuela”.
The
Car Wash investigation enshrined the myth that the Workers’ Party
and the whole Left is corrupt (but not the Right). Bolsonaro
overextended the myth: every minority and social class is a
target – in his mind they are “communists” and “terrorists.”
Goebbels
comes to mind – via his crucial text The Radicalization of
Socialism, where he emphasized the necessity of portraying
the center-left as Marxists and socialists because, as Stanley
notes, “the middle class sees in Marxism not so much the
subverter of national will, but mainly the thief of its property.”
That’s
at the center of Bolsonaro’s strategy of demonizing the Workers
Party – and the Left in general. The strategy of course is drenched
in fake news – once again mirroring what Stanley writes about U.S.
history: “The whole concept of empire is based on fake news. All of
colonization is based on fake news.”
Right
Against Left Populism?
As
I wrote in a previous
column, the
Left in the West is like a deer caught in the headlights when it
comes to fighting Right populism
Haddad:
Three weeks to head off Bolsonaro.
Sharp
minds from Slavoj Zizek to Chantal Mouffe are trying to conceptualize
an alternative – without being able to coin the definitive
neologism. Left populism? Popularism? Ideally, that should be
“democratic socialism” – but no one, in a post-ideology,
post-truth environment, would dare utter the dreaded word.
The
ascent of Right populism is a direct consequence of the emergence of
a profound crisis of political representation all over the West; the
politics of identity erected as a new mantra; and the overwhelming
power of social media, which allows – in Umberto Eco’s peerless
definition – the ascent of “the idiot of the village to the
condition of Oracle.”
As
we saw earlier, the central motto of Right populism in Europe is
anti-immigration – a barely disguised variation of hate towards The
Other. In Brazil the main theme, emphasized by Bolsonaro, is urban
insecurity. He could be the Brazilian Rodrigo Duterte – or Duterte
Harry: “Make my day, punk.”
He
portrays himself as the Righteous Defender against a corrupt elite
(even though he’s part of the elite); and his hatred of all things
politically correct, feminism, homosexuality, multiculturalism –
are all unpardonable offenses to his “family values.”
A Brazilian
historian says
the only way to oppose him is to “translate” to each sector of
Brazilian society how Bolsonaro’s positions affect them: on
“widespread weaponizing, discrimination, jobs, (and) taxes.” And
it has to be done in less than three weeks.
Arguably
the best book explaining the failure of the Left everywhere to deal
with this toxic situation is Jean-Claude Michea’s Le
Loup dans la Bergerie –
The Wolf Among the Sheep – published in France a few days ago.
Michea
shows concisely how the deep contradictions of liberalism since the
18th century – political, economic and cultural – led it to TURN
AGAINST ITSELF and be cut off from the initial spirit of tolerance
(Adam Smith, David Hume, Montesquieu). That’s why we are deep
inside post-democratic capitalism.
Euphemistically
called “the international community” by Western mainstream media,
the elites, who have been confronted since 2008 with “the growing
difficulties faced by the process of globalized accumulation of
capital,” now seem ready to do anything to keep
its privileges.
Michea
is right that the most dangerous enemy of civilization – and even
Life on Earth – is the blind dynamics of endless accumulation of
capital. We know where this neoliberal Brave New World is taking us.
The
only counterpunch is an autonomous, popular movement “that would
not be submitted to the ideological and cultural hegemony of
‘progressive’ movements that for over three decades defend only
the cultural interests of the new middle classes
around the world,” Michae says.
For
now, such a movement rests in the realm of Utopia. What’s left is
to try to remedy a coming dystopia – such as backing a real
Progressive Democratic Front to block a Bolsonaro Brazil.
One
of the highlights of my Italian sojourn was a meeting with Rolf
Petri, Professor of Contemporary History at the Ca Foscari University
in Venice, and author of the absolutely essential A
Short History of Western Ideology: A Critical Account.
Ranging
from religion, race and colonialism, to the Enlightenment project of
“civilization”, Petri weaves a devastating tapestry of how “the
imagined geography of a ‘continent’ that was not even a continent
offered a platform for the affirmation of European superiority and
the civilizing mission of Europe.”
During
a long dinner in a small Venetian trattoria away from the galloping
selfie hordes, Petri observed how Salvini – a middle-class small
entrepreneur – craftily found out how to channel a deep unconscious
longing for a mythical harmonious Europe that won’t be coming back,
much as petty bourgeois Bolsonaro evokes a mythical return to the
“Brazilian miracle” during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
Every
sentient being knows that the U.S. has been plunged into extreme
inequality “supervised” by a ruthless plutocracy. U.S. workers
will continue to be royally screwed as are French workers under
“liberal” Macron. So would Brazilian workers under Bolsonaro. To
borrow then from Yeats, what rough beast, in this darkest hour,
slouches towards freedom to be born?
By Pepe
Escobar / Republished
with permission / Consortium
News / Report
a typo
===========================================
* Hetzelfde is het geval met de term ‘neonazi’s’, alsof het nieuwe nazisme niet vergeleken kan worden met het nazisme uit de 20er en 30er jaren van de vorige eeuw, terwijl de haat tegen minderheden (waaronder Joden) even fanatiek is als in die tijd voorafgaand aan de machtsovername van de nazi’s in 1933.
Zie ook:
‘People of Brazil: my sincere condolences with ‘your’ fascistic, psychopathic president Bolsonaro……‘
‘Bolton geeft toe dat de VS een fascistisch beleid voert……‘
‘Bolsonaro wint Braziliaanse verkiezingen >> weer zijn we een fascistisch geleid land ‘rijker…’‘
‘Katy Sherriff (Radio1 correspondent Z-Amerika) brandt socialistische partij Brazilië af……‘
Mijn excuus voor het beperkte aantal labels direct onder dit bericht, je mag 20 labels voeren en dat met een beperkt aantal letters en tekens.