Syrians are returning home for the first time in generations. Your gift helps support the people rebuilding a free society.
John,
I was in Damascus, Syria, shortly after the country’s historic revolution that ended the brutal Assad dictatorship. We are witnessing a moment of profound change.
Over the past decades, millions of Syrians fled their country while millions more endured unimaginable economic hardship, brutality, and cruelty.
Now, for the first time in generations, people have been returning, because there’s a renewed sense of hope. That hope rests on local people building a free country founded on principles that allow people to flourish: economic liberty, the rule of law, toleration, property rights, and free enterprise.
As we speak, new pro-liberty networks and organizations are already taking shape. To be successful, they need support.
Atlas Network provides training, grants, and a vital network of peers to pro-freedom organizations wherever they are, even in countries that have suffered under the heavy boot of dictatorship.
Let me be frank.
I’m asking you to support freedom around the world in some of the most tyrannical countries. I am not calling on U.S. tax dollars or armed forces to be deployed abroad.
No, I want to help a global grassroots movement of private people like you and me who want freedom in their countries and who are organizing on the ground as we speak.
John, Atlas Network is raising $50,000 before December 31st at midnight in order to support our partners fighting for freedom around the world.
By supporting Atlas Network, you’ll get our Freedom’s Champion magazine, which will keep you up to date on the latest news from around the world about people fighting for freedom.
Here’s how Atlas Network supports our partners around the world.
After nearly 45 years of working in countries where freedom is under threat, Atlas Network has refined a proven process for raising the ambitions and achievements of people and teams devoted to the principles of liberty.
Atlas Network’s unique Coach, Compete, Celebrate strategic model inspires our partners to improve performance and achieve extraordinary outcomes. We coach them to become better change agents; we provide investments in their projects on a competitive basis, which drives excellence; and we celebrate each achievement, which provides inspiration for the next.
I’ve seen this process work over the decades, starting with my work behind the Iron Curtain as nations broke free from the dead hand of Communism. The fight is about ideas, but it is also a clash of strategies because those with power don’t like to give it up.
Collectivist ideologies are tools for the rulers to steal from their people, grabbing lavish lifestyles as their people suffer in poverty. Even though the Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela, the Cuban Communist Party, Putin’s dictatorship in Russia, and the Iranian ruling mullahs have superficially differing ideologies, the commonality is that the thugs that run them use the power of the state to enrich themselves to the detriment of the people who live under them.
Even the most brutal states are brittle because their subjects obey from fear rather than patriotism. When freedom-loving people realized how brittle the Syrian dictator’s grip on power was, the collapse came rapidly.
The talk now is not of a return to socialism but of free markets, free trade, and free people. I am guardedly hopeful that the many people I met at the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Industry and among writers, entrepreneurs, scholars, and students will succeed in laying a lasting foundation for a future of greater freedom, lawfulness, toleration, peace, and prosperity.
What makes a difference is that the ideas of liberty are widely understood and embraced by the ordinary people in the country. That is the long battle of ideas that we have to win in the Middle East and beyond.
As the American founders understood, liberty is not like power; if one person or group has power, it means that others experience not power but fear. It’s completely different with liberty because your liberty doesn’t diminish mine; in fact, your liberty complements mine. Liberty there strengthens liberty here, and vice versa. In each case, though, liberty must be understood and embraced. The challenge of achieving world peace and world prosperity is the challenge of achieving liberty for all.
The principles of supply and demand and fundamental economics apply everywhere, regardless of language, faith, location, or ethnicity.
That’s why Atlas Network is bringing together our partners to support the growing freedom movement in Syria. If Syria can join the ranks of free and flourishing nations, there is a real chance for peace in the region and beyond.
