 |
Taking Liberty Global
25 Years Building the World Liberty Movement
by Vince Miller with Jim Elwood
August 4, 2005 marked the 25th anniversary of my founding of
ISIL (which was then called Libertarian International). It occurred at a Great Lakes Conference of the
Students for a Libertarian Society, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Both Ed Clark, then in the midst of his 1980 Libertarian
presidential campaign, and Leonard Liggio, then president of the Institute
for Humane Studies, commented about it being high time to take the libertarian movement international. I
stood up and announced that I would do so.
Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman
addresses
ISIL conference in San Francisco.
SETTING THE STAGE
Luckily, I did not have to start completely from scratch. I had
been active in the Canadian movement since 1971, after meeting Bruce Evoy. Bruce had been a Nathaniel
Branden Institute rep in Toronto in the 60s, and in 1973 would found the Libertarian Party of Canada. A
trained Shakespearian actor, Bruce later became famous around the movement for his passionate
renditions of Patrick Henry's immortal "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech. A short while later, I
co-founded the Ontario provincial LP with Bruce and others. Also during this time, I assisted Bruce as an
editor of his pioneering Libertarian Option magazine.
In 1975, Roger MacBride –
who would be the 1976 Libertarian presidential candidate – took over publication of Option, and
renamed it The Mercury International Digest. I became editor-in-chief. Roger was co-creator
of the hit TV series The Little House on the Prairie and as a result had become quite wealthy. He
traveled the world, and frequently sent back names of libertarians he had met along the way to me for
the mailing list. Roger tried to market the Digest outside the libertarian movement, and found it to
be a formidable task. So he decided to cease publication, but he did leave me with the mailing list,
which became the core of LI.
I must note that there was some libertarian activity outside of
North America (even if not often labeled as such) prior to the time I started LI. The Mont Pelerin Society
had been founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 as an international network of free-market academics.
They still hold invitation-only annual meetings. Antony Fisher had
started thinktanks like the Institute for Economic Affairs in London in 1955, and later the Fraser
Institute in Vancouver, Canada – and others. Leonard Read
at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) – founded 1946 – later helped several fledgling
groups in Latin America.
And of course there were numerous Rand Objectivist groups in various
parts of the world.
The LI was largely modeled on the Society for Individual Liberty, the
first U.S. grassroots libertarian organization, founded in 1969 by Don Ernsberger,
Dave Walter and Jarret Wollstein.
From the beginning, we focused on the "Johnny Appleseed" strategy of giving networking support to
fledgling activists, and helping in the development of introductory-level publications for outreach to
the general public. The makeup of our organization has always been quite diverse, and our conferences
have always been open.
– FIRST STEP –
Building the West European Network
I knew that the first major step in building an international
movement would be to bring together the known leaders/activists at a world conference. Bruce Evoy came
back on board to help with the conference organizing, which was slated for August, 1982 in Zürich,
Switzerland.
In the meantime, I moved from Toronto to Richmond, Virginia and set
up shop in the offices of friend Jim Turney, who was the audio and
video archivist of the libertarian movement. I soon met the young LP activist Jim Elwood,
who jumped in as a part-time volunteer and is still with us today as ISIL's vice-president.
Zürich was a great success. Murray Rothbard was the keynote
speaker, and many stars from Europe and elsewhere were there. The most interesting thing about the
Zürich event was that the participants (mostly from around Europe) had not known about the other's
existence, and were thrilled to know they were not alone on the continent.
Hubert Jongen of the Dutch
Libertarian Center felt that the Europeans could not afford to wait two years for the next conference,
so he organized a major event in Brussels in 1983. It was also very successful. Hubert – with
much support from wife Rita – has been a moving force behind the substantial growth of the
pan-European network.
The growth in western Europe during the 80s was abetted by a
continued string of LI World Conferences: 1984 - London, 1985 - Beitostolen (north of Oslo, Norway),
1986 - Stockholm, and 1987 - Kalterherberg, Germany (near Dusseldorf).
Libertarians Nominated for the
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
During this period, Leon Louw and
wife Frances Kendall of South Africa became superstars of the
world movement. Leon had co-founded the Free Market Foundation in Johannesburg in 1976.
One of their successful endeavors was the Law Review Project,
administered by Louise Tager, Dean of the Law School at the University of Witswatersrand. They
generated packages of legislation and research that resulted in the repeal of over 200 apartheid laws –
under the old government!
There was widespread fear in the mid-80s of a possible racial civil
war in South Africa, which prompted Frances and Leon to produce a book called South Africa: The
Solution. The book proposed a Swiss-styled decentralist system and limited government to defuse
racial tensions. The Solution smashed sales records for a non-fiction book and drew praise
from across the political spectrum.
In spite of their proven anti-apartheid record, because they were
white, the Swedish government blocked their entry into Sweden to speak at our 1986 world conference in
Stockholm – until they were provided endorsements by, of all people, Bishop Tutu and Winnie Mandela.
And then during the conference, the Marxist-Leninists showed up outside our hotel, waving red
communist flags and singing the "Internationale" to protest the presence of two white South Africans.
Not wanting this silliness to go unchallenged, Leon strode right
up to the group leader and nose to nose and said, "Are you discriminating against me because of the color of
my skin?" The leftie, obviously taken somewhat aback, stammered "Um, er, uh – No!" After the
communists found out that we were eager for souvenir samples of the pamphlets they were passing out
denouncing us, they started selling them to us! Ah, capitalism!
We honored both Frances and Leon at the closing banquet with
the first ISIL Freedom Torch Award gold medals for their groundbreaking work.
As excellent examples of the power of networking that has
resulted from ISIL conferences, members of the Nobel Economics committee attended Stockholm and met
the Louws. Also, Norwegian ISIL member Dr. Kai Stensrod knew members of the Nobel Peace Prize
nominating committee and helped Leon and Frances to be formally nominated three times – an honor that
only goes to about ten people each year!
U.S. member Kerry Welsh also met them at Stockholm. He
moved to South Africa for a couple years, and helped the Louw/Kendall team launch a "Groundswell"
organization to promote the libertarian decentralist ideas in The Solution. He helped them
garner a full-page article in TIME magazine, and an editorial endorsement in the Wall
Street Journal. The publicity gave a big boost to fundraising efforts to help Groundswell and the
Free Market Foundation.
And in 1988, Frances Kendall organized an excellent LI World
Conference in Mbabane, Swaziland. The conference was enlivened by a dialogue with a dozen members of
the ANC (and we had spies from the South African secret police). The post-conference tour to Kruger
National Park was incomparable. Seeing a lioness using our vehicle as a blind and then taking off after a
kudu antelope, or seeing four giraffes crossing the road, and being charged by a bull elephant,
definitely got the adrenalin flowing.
ISIL IS BORN
1989 was a pivotal year for LI. In January, we approached Don
Ernsberger and Dave Walter –
co-directors of the Society for Individual Liberty – about a merger. They readily accepted,
stipulating that the announcement be made at the SIL 20th Anniversary banquet, to be held August 31st
in Philadelphia, just before the Libertarian Party national convention (which they were also
organizing). All agreed to name the new organization the International Society for Individual Liberty.
We then initiated the process of incorporating the new organization,
and filing for non-profit foundation status with the IRS so that donations to ISIL could be tax-
deductible (which took two years).
August 31st was an exciting night. There were many reminiscenses by
SIL notables, including uproarious stories about the big split of the libertarians from the
conservatives at the 1969 St. Louis convention of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Then
movement legend Karl Hess made the announcement about
the merger, and there were toasts given by Frances Kendall and Hubert Jongen. ISIL was under way!
The merger led to the re-activation of another SIL co-founder,
Jarret Wollstein. Jarret had been a prolific writer of
SIL's original pamphlet series in the 70s. He offered to update the series for ISIL, and has authored
or co-authored 20 of ISIL's current 39 pamphlet titles. Millions of these pamphets have been
distributed by local libertarian groups across North America, and they have been translated and
published in print and on the web by quite a few overseas ISIL members.
Also that year, Jim Peron,
who had attended both Stockholm and Swaziland (and had been present at the founding in Ann Arbor),
contacted us about taking over his Free Forum Bookstore in San Francisco.
 Freedom's Forum Bookstore in San Francisco (run by ISIL from 1990 thru 1997).
Jim Elwood and I flew out on a scouting trip, and arrived back
in Richmond just four days before the earthquake!
And then just days later, a human earthquake ocurred – the fall
of the Berlin Wall! We watched it on TV with joy, and with wonderment that the brutal communist
regimes were collapsing with nary a shot being fired. An amusing tidbit from the time – ISIL
member Bonne Posma immediately flew to Berlin to check
out real estate and business opportunities in the old East Germany. When he came back through
Checkpoint Charlie, the West German guards handed him a leaflet that read "Welcome to West Germany,
where property rights are mandatory."
ISIL MOVES INTO EASTERN EUROPE
In May, 1990, we said goodbye to Richmond and drove cross-
country to take over the San Francisco bookstore. Then in August, with Jim Peron, we hosted our world
conference in San Francisco. It was a star-studded affair with speakers like the Louws, congressman
Ron Paul, Peruvian congressman Enrique Ghersi,
Norwegian MP Carl Hagen, and many other stars of the U.S.
and international movements. And to cap it off, we had Nobel laureate Milton Friedman as the banquet
speaker!
Our attention increasingly shifted to the newly-liberated
countries of central and eastern Europe. Our Finnish rep Roger Wessman
had brought Ahto Lobjakas of the Estonian independence
movement to the San Francisco conference, and in 1991, we had two Romanians and the deputy foreign
minister of Slovenia as participants at the ISIL world conference in Elsinore, Denmark. This happened
to be at the time of the attempted KGB coup in Moscow, and everyone was grabbing time to watch the
drama unfolding on CNN. The easterners were biting their fingernails wondering if it would be safe to
go home!
In 1992, we held our conference in Poprad, in the eastern part of
what is now Slovakia. Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus
was scheduled to speak, but with the split pending and having just announced that the Czechs would
gladly absorb the Slovak share of the national debt to help get rid of the socialist Slovak bloc in
parliament, he figured he would not be terribly welcome in the east, and backed out.
Our German co-organizer that year hadn't prepared us for the
quality of the conference site. But as a result, we got a good taste of what life had really been
like in the communist world. Prague, which we visited on the way, was already well on the way to
regaining its old status as one of the jewels of Europe. But in eastern Slovakia, there were only
glimmers of change and the landscape was littered with heavily polluting Soviet-era factories. The
conference was held at a rundown technical school. Nearby chemical plants spewed choking, thick brown
sulfurous smoke, to the extent that you could not even see the nearby Tatra Mountains! Fortunately, on
the first night after we arrived, a huge thunderstorm cleared the air, so it was bearable for the rest
of the conference.
The co-organizer hired a young lady named Janca Lackova who
was setting up a local travel agency to handle catering and local activities. She hired her family and
friends to help out, and it was fascinating to see them learn – with the help of advice from
conference attendees – a lot about basic business practices and customer service. They worked
extremely hard, and even partied with us.
Poprad was the first year that we provided conference scholarships.
As a result, we met several east Europeans who became key activists and ISIL Reps, like
Valentina Nicolae of Romania, Tomislav
Krsmanovic of Serbia, and Virgis Daukas
of Lithuania. We also met Jan Oravec and members of the
newly-formed F.A. Hayek Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia. They would later became instrumental in the
extensive Slovak economic reforms (with help from ISIL through donations of books to build a research
library at the office of the Prime Minister). And we met Steve Browne,
an American who was teaching English in Warsaw. Steve would later co-found the Lithuanian
Liberty English Camps with Virgis Daukas, and would help Tomislav promote books.
That same year, ISIL director Ken Schoolland and Danish
member Nicolai Heering had visited St. Petersburg, Russia
where they met two young tour guides (Dmitry Kostygin and
William Milonoff). The two young Russians turned out to
be quite interested in libertarian ideas and particularly the works of Ayn Rand.
They wanted to translate and publish books, so in the next spring, ISIL sponsored them on a speaking
tour of the U.S. They raised several thousand dollars and acquired some computer equipment, and upon
their return proceeded to publish Russian editions of Ken Schoolland's free-market fable The
Adventures of Jonathan Gullible and Mary Ruwart's Healing Our World. They also
published Ayn Rand's We The Living.
There were still no private printers in Russia, so they ended up
bribing workers at the Navy Department to print the first of the Rand novels in Russian!
Roger Wessman organized the 1993 ISIL conference in Tallinn,
Estonia. Estonia had adopted strong free-market reforms immediately upon independence, and the
country was just beginning to show the results. Afterwards, about 40 of us traveled to St. Petersburg
on what we called the "Dr. Zhivago Express" – a Russian train with ancient wooden cars (with the
windows nailed shut). Along with spectacular sites like the Hermitage art museum and Catherine the
Great's summer palace, we also stopped by to see the former apartment where Ayn Rand's family had
lived. The locals must have been totally perplexed when a busload of tourists arrived at this obscure
building on a side street in a non-descript neighborhood and started taking pictures and doing
dollar-sign genuflections!
– ISIL Helps Defeat –
"HILLARY-CARE"
In 1994, a debate was raging across America on health care. Hillary
Clinton and her commission had come up with a "Health Security Act" that amounted to a government
takeover of medicine. ISIL director Jarret Wollstein had researched the Act and had produced
a "Clinton Health Care Disaster" pamphlet. The nationally-syndicated libertarian radio host
Gene Burns had just joined ISIL and read the pamphlet
on the air.
In early April, Burns invited Jarret onto his show. Ahead of him
was Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala,
who parroted the administration line that this bill would improve care, increase efficiency, protect privacy, etc.
Jarret started his segment by saying: "Either the Secretary has
not read the act, or she is lying through her teeth". Jarret quoted chapter and verse from the Act to
show its fascistic nature.
Before the show, we had thought we would get a few dozen calls at
most. When Burns gave out our phone number, it immediately started ringing, and didn't stop for days.
The fax churned out information requests like a printing press. We got bags of letters. All told, we
sent information to 3,127 people. This resulted in many new ISIL memberships and sales of almost
100,000 health-care pamphlets in the following month. In fact, C-SPAN TV showed congressmen holding up
the "Clinton Disaster" pamphlet as they denounced the Act!
Due to the intense opposition of many libertarian and
conservative groups and media (and also due to lefties who had wanted pure socialized medicine)
"HillaryCare" never even came up for a vote in Congress. But the political firestorm helped the
Republicans both win back the Senate in the 1994 elections after 8 years of Democratic control, and
break the Democrats 40-year reign in the House of Representatives.
More Developments In
NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE
In October that year, we held the ISIL conference in Mérida,
Mexico with the help of ISIL advisory board member Alicia Clark. Several of our group were invited to
meet the state governor. He told us that they had no love for Mexico City, and that the Yucatan had
twice tried to secede from Mexico! Besides a fine conference, we also saw the world-famous Mayan ruins
at Uxmal and Chichen Itza.
The 1995 ISIL world conference was held in Athens, hosted by
our Greek Rep Jason Zafolias, who happened to own the
4-star hotel where the conference was held. Our scholarship participants included for the first time
individuals from Bulgaria, Hungary and Macedonia. Philosopher Tibor Machan
addressed the conference each morning in a toga (impersonating Aristotle). Fun.
On the post-conference tour, we consulted with the Oracle at Delphi,
and visited the ancient monasteries on top of the other-worldly thousand-foot pinnacles at Meteora.
A LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY AGAINST ISIL
In 1996 we held our first conference in Canada. Kurt Pokrandt
and the Vancouver libertarians did a splendid job organizing the event, held in the mountain resort of
Whistler (site of the 2006 Winter Olympics).
A lot of drama occurred behind the scenes. One of our speakers
was Colorado Republican state senator Charles Duke, who
had launched the "10th Amendment Sovereignty Resolution" to protest against unfunded federal mandates
imposed on the states by the Feds. Twenty-six of 50 state legislatures had passed the resolution.
A US-based leftist foundation tried to smear Charles Duke as a
wacko rascist miltia sympathizer and tried to get him confused with Lousiana legislator David Duke, a
former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The organization contacted their friends in the British Columbia
Communist Party, and they badgered the hotel to cancel the conference, and spread word throughout the
Canadian media about this supposed collection of racist nuts.
As a result, we had TV and newspaper reporters crawling over
the conference, and we received extensive media coverage across Canada – even on the French Network.
But they very quickly had to drop their original intent to smear us as racist militia nuts after they
started seeing blacks and Asians in the audience, including Nigerian Rep Innocent Eleazu in his traditional garb of
a tribal chief. Not to mention that we were proposing peaceful solutions to social ills. (One reporter
told speaker Larry Dodge of the Fully-Informed Jury
Association "You're not interesting at all!") Then they switched to accusing us of having "sinister
hidden agendas" – and they carefully edited their video clips to omit any images of non-white
participants!
Sadly, we had to close our Freedom's Forum Bookstore in the
summer of 1997, after our building was sold out from under us, and we could not find affordable retail
space. The building was bought for a gay community center with what eventually amounted to about $10
million in tax money arranged by Democratic Party insiders. We moved into our current quarters in the
suburb of Benicia, sans bookstore.
On a cheerier note, we had a fun world conference in Rome that
October. It was organized by Alberta Martino, daughter
of Antonio Martino, a Chicago School free-market economist and a Cabinet Member in the Italian
government. He spoke as well. The post-tour included spectacular sites like Capri, Pompei and the Amalfi coast.
In 1998, the ISIL conference was held in the former East Berlin
with the Liberal Akademie Berlin. (Amusingly, during the communist era, the location for our conference
was at the intersection of streets previously named Lenin Allee and Ho Chi Minh Strasse). Amongst the
many sites we saw, the Checkpoint Charlie museum with its stories of heroic escapes from Communist
tyranny was extremely moving.
MOVEMENT-BUILDING IN COSTA RICA
 ISIL World Conference in San José, Costa Rica – from left to right –
Movimiento Libertario Congressman Otto Guevara, Judge
Douglas Ginsberg, Costa Rican President Miguel Angel Rodriguez,
ISIL President Vince Miller and INLAP President Rigoberto Stewart.
In the mid-90s, we developed a strong relationship with Dr.
Rigoberto Stewart, who became ISIL's Costa Rica Rep.
Stewart, descended from Jamaican slaves, had received his college education in the U.S. and had been
an economics consultant with the World Bank, working with Latin American governments on agricultural
policies.
Rigo was a co-founder of the Movimiento Libertario political
party, but after meeting many top ISIL people at our conferences, decided to focus on building a
public-policy thinktank (INLAP) and a "Limon Real" autonomy project for the Caribbean province.
In 1999, he organized a terrific ISIL world conference in San Jose.
Among the speakers was Costa Rica's president, Miguel Angel Rodriquez,
who had written a book on Friedrich Hayek – but he wasn't quite so good once in office (typical, I'm afraid). We also heard the
inspiring story of the founding and growth of the Movimiento Libertario, which had elected Otto Guevara
to Congress. Otto was named "Congressman of the Year" for three years in a row by the Costa Rican media
for his principled stands and accessibility. We then visited Limón province on the tour.
INTO THE NEW MILLENIUM
Mary Lou Gutscher of
Canada, who had contributed substantially to organizing and emceeing several ISIL conferences, hosted
the 2000 conference in London, Ontario. A highlight of this conference was the appearance of a fiery
young Indian activist from British Columbia, Meaghan Walker-Williams, who was battling corruption in the tribal leadership and was
working to develop a free-enterprise zone on the reservation. The post-conference tour included the
world-famous Niagara Falls.
2001 was the bi-centennial of the birth of the great French
classical-liberal Frederic Bastiat. Jacques de Guenin, who had founded Le Cercle Bastiat to promote his
ideas and republish his books in France, organized a terrific ISIL conference in the southwestern resort of
Dax as part of the commemoration. A stellar speaker lineup featured heavyweights like Madsen Pirie of
the Adam Smith Institute in London and Alain Madelin – former French finance minister and candidate
for president (he got 4% in a crowded field in the ensuing election). We were able to sponsor a record 50
scholarship participants from Eastern Europe and Africa.
And, we got protestors! The ATTAC group, part of the socialist
anti-free trade, anti-corporate, anti-globalization network that has plagued so many WTO and other
international meetings, showed up at our dedication of a new plaque affixed to an existing statue of
Bastiat in the village of Mugron, and at our dedication of a new plaque on the house in the seaport of
Bayonne where Bastiat was born. Luckily for us, these protests (unlike many of their others) were
peaceful, and we had some dialogue with them.
Little did we know that just two months later, the world would
change. We were in shock from the horrible events of September 11th. Like many people, we feared that it
would be just the beginning of waves of attacks, which would cripple the U.S. economy and our liberty.
Fortunately, that has not happened, but the war environment has made the fight for liberty all the more
challenging.
We pressed ahead with our international development. In 2002,
we switched our attention back to Latin America, holding an exuberant conference in Puerto Vallarta,
Mexico, co-organized with our travel agent Rick Foss and Mexican professor Edgar Piña. Along with
many great Latin American libertarians, we enjoyed not only the conference, but also the most luxurious
locale we have ever had at the five-star beachfront La Jolla de Mismaloya hotel. (It was off-season, so we
got a great deal). We also sponsored about 25 students from around Latin America, including winners of a
special essay contest based on reviews of Ken Schoolland's The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible and
Hernando de Soto's acclaimed The Mystery of Capital.
In 2003, we revisited the former communist bloc, this time in
Vilnius, Lithuania. This conference was splendidly hosted by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, a first-
rate thinktank that has had a substantial positive impact on the government's policies. It was heartening to
see happy, well-dressed people enjoying rising prosperity. It stood in stark contrast to their recent past, of
which we saw evidence first-hand in the KGB basement compound in Vilnius and a fortress near Kaunas
that had been a Nazi death camp. Both the hope and horrors were highly motivating to the ISIL
participants.
Last year, we moved the ISIL conference into a new area of the
world – New Zealand. Not only is the country breathtakingly beautiful, but it had experienced
the "New Zealand Miracle" of the 1980's, when the government was forced to adopt a broad program of free-market
reforms as a result of the bankruptcy of their welfare state. Sir Roger Douglas,
architect of many of the reforms, was the featured speaker, along with several current MPs from several parties and scientists on
environmental issues. Attendees raved about the terrific speaker lineup, which had been assembled by
Jim Peron of the Institute for Liberal Values. Rodney Hide,
MP and leader of the Alliance of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT) party (originally founded as a citizen's
lobby by Roger Douglas), kept the crowd hugely entertained as conference emcee.
And this year, we held another great ISIL conference, this time
near Cologne, Germany. (See full report in this issue).
This brief ISIL history summary has focused on our annual world conferences, largely because they are
our glamour events – and they have played an enormous role in bringing libertarians together from all
over the world.
ISIL conferences have led to many personal friendships and even
marriages, and they have fostered the creation of many important networks, organizations and
publishing projects throughout Europe, and increasingly in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
But ISIL has done a lot of other important work as well in its
day-to-day operations.
ISIL/FREE-MARKET.NET WEBSITE
The combined ISIL/Free-Market.Net website is growing at a
rapid rate with millions of hits a month from all over the world! The "Philosophy of Liberty" flash
animation is drawing an average of 15,000 visits per month and is eliciting rave reviews from many
viewers – especially the young. Another favorite is the ISIL pamphlet "Free Trade vs. Protectionism".
And as you see elsewhere in this FNN, we are now adding specialty issue channels on the site for
research and discussions.
Along with the website, we are, in cooperation with our friends
at Rational Review News Digest, providing thousands of on-line subscribers with an excellent "Freedom
News Daily" synopsis and links to general news stories – plus freedom movement news and commentaries.
And we send out occasional FM News internal bulletins regarding ISIL developments. (You can contact
JamesRElwood@cs.com with your subscription request to these complimentary services) – or you can log
on directly on the ISIL home page.
The Internet gives us incredible leverage for reaching huge
numbers of people with our message – at miniscule cost. And the Internet is a far more level playing field
for libertarians in the battle of ideas.
ISIL publications and sponsored overseas translation projects have
always been aimed at bringing introductory-level literature to the grassroots.
In North America, over 5 million pieces of the ISIL Educational
Pamphlet Series have been distributed by local libertarian and single-issue groups. Overseas libertarians
have frequently translated and published them in print and on the web.
Overseas, the top success story has been the spread of ISIL
director Ken Schoolland's award-winning fable The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey.
Frequently with seed capital from ISIL donors, it has now been published by local publishers in 35
languages. Several more are in the works – including an Arabic edition.
ISIL has sponsored several overseas editions of other fine libertarian
books such as Karl Hess's Capitalism for Kids,
Mary Ruwart's Healing Our World, Ayn Rand's Anthem, and Frances Kendall's Super Parents Super Children.
And, in one of our proudest achievements, we helped bring
several of Ayn Rand's works into print in her native Russia!
 Dmitry Kostygin displays new cover art for the Russian version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (St. Petersburg, Russia).
ISIL has grown from a handful of members in a few Western
countries to now over 100 countries all around the world. It is especially thrilling to see the
recent rise of top libertarian activists in Asia and Africa.
ISIL provides complimentary print literature and research books
to hundreds of individuals in dozens of countries who otherwise could not afford to be involved in ISIL.
Of course, more and more of this activity is occurring through the Internet. In fact, ISIL hosts a
website and e-mail list for the "African Resource Bank",
a central African network of young activists and thinktanks organized by ISIL's outstanding Kenyan
Rep James Shikwati.
And there are the conference scholarships already mentioned
throughout this article.
With the globalization of the liberty movement, we are now
beginning to achieve dreams that we have had since the founding days in the early 1980's.
True credit goes to the courageous and dedicated men and
women who are promoting liberty in their communities and countries – many in places that have
been reduced to desperate levels of poverty by socialism – and which are still dangerous for
people bringing "subversive" ideas to the people. The good news is that people in these places are
hungry for alternatives like ours, and are far more likely to embrace freedom ideas more quickly then
the fatter, happier and complaisant people of Western welfare states.
It would take a major book to list all the people and organizations
who have contributed to the success of ISIL's conferences and other projects, and to provide profiles
of many of the fascinating individuals in our world network. If we missed you in this summary, we
extend our thanks one more time for your great work.
We at ISIL are happy to have been able to help boost progress
here and there. And that has been possible thanks to all of you loyal members who have contributed
financially to ISIL's work.
We hope you are as excited as we are at how far ISIL has come
in these 25 years, and at how our progress is accelerating. We expect to reward your continued support of
ISIL with reports of much more progress in coming years!
|
|
