Memo April 2018
A memo sent to correspondents, friends and acquaintances of the Budapest Observatory (BO) in April 2018
This memo went to 4550 addresses.
BO Memos, 1999-2018
The first monthly newsletter was sent to six “advisors” in February 1999. In the initial period the memos carried domestic news about the fledgling observatory, to gradually turning into a monitoring device of culture in east-central Europe. (Link to the previous memo and to all of them.)
It was inspiring to believe that what these memos are tracking is a process of convergence. European integration was a household term at that time, which sounds anachronistic today. We are witnessing instead the closing of the east-European mind.
On the left: picture taken at the Pan-European Picnic when in 1989 Hungary opened its border for East German refugees to leave for Austria. The site has been awarded the European Heritage Label.
On the right: billboards of the Hungarian government, showing a migrants’ procession, displayed during the campaign to the April 2018 Parliamentary elections.
The inglourious restoration
BO once again is surrounded by the once familiar milieu, officially generated brain washing about foreign agents and menace to the nation, about the decay of the west, undergoing increasing spiritual autarky. No less disheartening is the reaction* in the west.
So this is the last memo. Not because of direct coercion or threat, and not due to running out of money. No-one ever paid for making the memos, it was done pro bono, as BO’s public relations medium. No physical breakdown either, the undersigned is holding fit and keeps working. The spirit is gone, driven out by other, toxic spirits.
* The leader of the largest party in the European Parliament has sincerely welcomed these developments in the name of stability. Stability is a value, no doubt, and it appears to be beating the “European values”. A belated tribute to Gaddafi and similar colonels, a timid smile sent to Erdoğan and Putin. The name is Manfred Weber.
Post Scriptum
to the Last Memo
P.S. BO loves you
We knew there will be reactions to shutting down the monthly BO bulletins but did not expect this many. I responded to the first few but then we gave up. (Specific questions are picked out and answered directly.) This is therefore an acknowledgement of receipt for the messages that were sent upon MemoApr18, which we have distilled into this one file.
BO is no political organisation and we tried to avoid watching and commenting cultural phenomena on the ground of one ideology. But indeed, the devastating defeat of liberal democracy at the Hungarian elections was the deciding blow. The despair had already been accumulating along the past couple of years. Composing the monthly newsletters was hard work which would require better humour and deeper belief in the meaning of the exercise.
Once you are here
Fundamental transformations have taken place about the treatment of cultural heritage; the concern about the respect for past diversity nevertheless remains largely unexplored. Pragmatic political common sense as well as a desire for moral comfort call for more explicit exposition of the manifestations of this issue and the ways how it is handled. We believe, that the appreciation of earlier stakeholders, and of the legacy of multiculturalism should be part of the European standard of managing cultural heritage.
This is the topic of the latest BO paper.
Your data
Opinion begins to pop up in the European media that the data security lobby has achieved something nearly as catastrophic as Brexit. It will take years to re-weave the fabric that the ill-prepared and badly communicated introduction of GDPR (in nice Polish: RODO) has torn into pieces without really contributing to the personal security and saving us from digital exploitation and contamination.
So good that BO need not enter the craze. We have no mailing list although we keep a list of contacts. We treat addresses on the list as those of friends: we do not share them with “third parties” unless it takes place in the usual normal way of networking and not without informing you.
With kind regards – Péter Inkei
The Budapest Observatory
(Regional Observatory on Culture in East-Central Europe)
H-1051 Budapest, Október 6 utca 14
Tel: (361) 327 3181
http://www.budobs.org
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