Amerikai Magyar Szó, 2000. július-december (54. évfolyam, 27-48. szám)
2000-07-06 / 27. szám
Thursday, July 6, 2000 Amerikai Magyar Szó 3. Bela Liptak The Hungarian Lobby and the Internet Connection (Kedves Olvasóim! Az alábbi sorokat azért írtam angol ül, mert nem Önöknek, hanem gyermekeiknek, unokáiknak, azoknak a fiataloknak írtam azokat, kiknek mellében még magyar szív dobog, de már nem jól értik Madách Imre és Arany János nyelvét Kérem adják oda Nékik ezt az írást és mondják még azt is, hogy a Magyar Lobby 2000 fiatalja szeretettel várja őket Várja, mert eljött annak az ideje, hogy a másfél millió magyar származású amerikai szavazó befolyásolja az amerikai elnökjelöltek külpolitikai platformjait és ezt csak együtt összefogva érhetjük el.) I wrote down some demands for the first time ever, during the night of the 22nd of October in 1956, when at the Technical University of Budapest we formulated those 16 demands, which started the Hungarian Revolution. Ever since those days I respected the power of the written word. When in 1968, Edward Teller wrote a preface to one of my books, I viewed his gesture not as a personal favor. I thought of that preface as a way to emphasize that this contribution to technical progress (the 1st edition of a handbook dealing with computer optimization of industry, which now is in its 4th edition), was a Hungarian contribution. During the last decades, no year has passed without some of my letters being printed in the New York Times and < other papers. All of these experiences taught me something about influencing public opinion and I would like to share that knowledge with you. How To Get Your Letter Published? I will start by talking about successful letter writing. The recipe is pretty simple: first you have to get your letter published and second; people have to remember what you wrote. The first step is critical, because larger papers receive thousands of letters and, ninety-nine percent of them are filtered out before they even reach those people who make the selections. Therefore, it is advisable to invest the effort needed to learn the identity of the editor of the editorial page and to send you letter directly to her/his attention.lt is also advisable to send your text with a cover letter, wich shows that you are familiar with that editor’s work and past contributions. Once that editor has published a few of yQur texts, the cover letter can be replaced by a yellow stick-on slip, but that should not be omitted because you need to make your correspondence stand out. As the Internet matured, it also turned into a more useful tool to publish letters. I first used this tool when President Iliescu of Romania visited the White House. I wrote a letter to President Clinton and sent copies of that letter to everybody I knew in the human rights community. I asked these people to do two things: 1) Send the same letter to President Clinton and 2) Ask everybody among their circle of friends to do the same. Later I learned that on the day before Iliescu’s visit President Clinton received over 1,000 letters. I was also told that the President gpt "boiling mad" because of what he learned from these letters. Well, Iliescu lost the election and the rest is history, including the fact that the idea of the Hungarian Lobby was born on that day. The Hungarian Lobby (HL) is nothing more than a voice amplifier. It operates on the knowledge that if a thousand letters say something, the addressee is likely to pay more attention.Today we have over 2,000 HL members who receive one action-call a week and about half of them usually act on it. The older members with more time on their hands are likely to be signed on to the HL-list ( hl@glue.umd.edu ), where in addition to the action-call, a continuous discussion concerning past errors and future actions is also taking place. The younger and busier HL members are signed on to the HL-ACTION list ( hl-action@glue.umd.edu ), where they receive nothing else except one (already prepared and addressed) action call a week. This they can sign and mail out in a couple of minutes. Forming Public Opinion by Writing Letters To get a letter published is much easier than to publish an effective one. A good letter should not only contain information, which the reader did not know, but should also advocate something, which the reader agrees with and therefore will remember. To produce such a letter, one must write it with an in-depth knowledge of how the reader’s mind operates. In addition, one must advocate a cause, wich is also in the interest of the reader. In other words, your cause must be supported, your sails must be powered by the prevailing wind of public opinion. This concept I will exlain by using a couple of examples, the first being the case of the Danube: The Danube and the Parshall Flume The reason why all international environmental organizations supported my Compromise Plan for the Danube in The Hague (against the combined forces of the Me dar and Horn Governments) was not because they cared about Hungary’s loss of her border river. No, they did not arrange an international news conference for me in the Dutch Parliament, just because they cared about the unique species of the Szigetköz. No, they did that because the Compromise Plan I am proposing for Gabciko- vo could also solve their river problems in their own countries. And the reason why we are going to win in The Hague (in the 2nd round) is not because of the desire to save 400 unique species or the desire to uphold international law. No, the reason is the Parshall Flume! So why is the Parshall Flume so important? The reason is that ALL river-disputes always center on the water level in the river. Agricultural and hydroelectric interests want that level to be high so that the water will reach their turbines and irrigation systems while environmentalists want the riverbed open, so that pollution will not accumulate upstream, the rotting vegetation will not stoke global warming and the fish can travel freely. Therefore, in the past, the fight between these two groups centered on building or not building dams. The Parshall Flume (a scientifically designed artificial strait), which can elevate the upstream waters to any desired level by narrowing the riverbed while leaving the bottom open, can satisfy both of these camps. It was because of this general appeal and universal applicability of the Compromise Plan that we received all the international support and why all my letters and articles been published in the West. It is also for this reason that the Danube will eventually be returned into her natural riverbed. Hungarian Minorities and the Danubian Confederation One can also illustrate how we can fill our sails with the prevailing winds of supporting Western public opinion by using the example of protecting our minorities. When writing letters to newspapers, we should start with some well checked, but not widely known fact, such as that England approved in 1938 the first Vienna Award or that the Trianon Treaty itself recommends autonomy for every ethnic minority it has created. Once the interest of the reader is captured, one might proceed to explain that the guaranteeing of minority rights is a prerequisite for a peaceful and prosperous future everywhere on this planet. The reader of our letter will better understand our point, if we emphasize that the largest ethnic minority in Europe is the block of some 26 million ethnic Russians living outside the borders of the Russian state. Because of the 80th anniversary of Trianon and because six newspapers have published my articles about the lessons we can learn from the treaty, I would like to conclude by summing up the main points of those articles. In most cases I started with a quotation from Walter Lippmann who in 1920 fought against the "balkanization" of Central Europe and against the replacement of a real power in the region with an agglomeration of weak and hostile nation states. Next I switched to presenting the views of a respected journalist of the present, such as that of Flora Lewis who still believes that Kossuth’s Danubian Confederation might well have averted two world wars an<*ts renewal could avert a thmi. Once I have established that the idea of a Central European Federation is credible, I usually proceed to list historical examples showing that whenever there was no real power within the Danubian Basin, the Balkans became destabilized, because no distant foreign powers would provide permanently stationed troops to stabilize it. Once the "Balkan connection" is established people start paying attention, because it is in both America’s and NATO’s interest to bring their troops home. In addition to that interest, people in the West also realize that while Central Europe vanished when Churchill’s Iron Curtain split Europe in two, now it is time to reinsert that balancing and stabilizing power between Germany and Russia. The formation of the group called the "Visegrad Four" was the first hesitant step towards the building of such a confederation. The USA and NATO should support this trend not only because it brings regional stability. They should support it, not only because the development of local power in the region will allow their troops to go home and be replaced by less expensive local NATO forces. No, the most important reason why they should support it because history tells us that this is the right thing to do. Conclusion In the letters and articles published by the Hungarian Lobby, we usually don’t even mention if Hungary has an interest in the particular issue, but in connection with the Danubian Federation I would like to list the reasons why it would be in our interest. Firstly, the Danubian Confederation would give protection to all Hungarians, while the borders of a United Europe will cut the nation in half. Secondly, the confederation would de-emphasize the importance of the borders, which today separate major parts of the Hungarian nation from the state of Hungary. Thirdly, because there would be no majority in this multi-national federation, the uniform laws would outlaw all forced assimilation or ethnic discrimination and would guarantee full autonomy to all minorities. (And in closing let me just mention that even today with no federation at all, if ethnic origin would guarantee visa-free travel to (Cont. P. 5.)
