But this is precisely the economic “interventionism” that Dewey opposes. His role model is a sniveling Mexican bureaucrat whom he quotes later on in his essay. "Of course, we have to handicap you by legislation and administration in every way we can. You are much abler and more experienced in business than we are; if we don't even up some other way, you will soon own the whole country." What does this essentially state? That the productive men who invest their time and effort abroad must be penalized not for their incompetence, but for their ability, not for their vices but for their virtues. That is the statist nihilism which seeks to destroy the good for being the good. That mentality is precisely what Dewey wishes to perpetuate by opposing the American government’s efforts to defend the entrepreneurs when their rights and the products of their minds are threatened by a moral decadent’s gun. The unnamed corrupt desk clerk, who had likely risen to power by means of a family connection or affiliation with a robber clan whose fortune was built on extortion, will see no deterrence to his acting upon the “pragmatist” conception that his own power-lust of the moment is justification to hoard the wealth created by a meritorious individual without the creator’s consent.

From a literal founder of “anti-imperialism”, the man who had introduced also the educational paradigms of today and a majority of the teachings of today’s academia, comes the genuine motive for the smear campaign waged to this day. It exists to cripple free markets around the world, to limit the productive capacities of economic pioneers, or, which is even more alarming, to subject the great innovators to the parasitic expropriations of the statist regimes which are upheld in their splendor solely by the squalid destitution experienced by their subjects. Does it now seem a coincidence that the leftists constantly label a man like Hernan Cortes a blackguard, a man who had assisted a hundred tribes in Mesoamerica in throwing off a two-century-long yoke of oppression imposed upon them by the bloody Aztec regime, which had sacrificed daily 20,000 of their subjects’ men, women, and children? It was Cortes whose efforts had abolished human sacrifice in perpetuity, liberated the common folk of Mexico from back-breaking feudal duties to the ruling elite, who had introduced European industry into the Americas and helped originate a system of encomienda, in which, unlike common stereotypes suggest, the natives were paid for their services and taught new skills which rendered them capable of thriving on their own labor. It was also the Spanish who had in 1542 passed a series of Indian Protection Laws forbidding the unpaid for utility of native services, as well as Native American slavery in New Spain. Yet no historical endeavor is slandered and abased to the degree that this massive amelioration has been in past years.

Let us explore a more recent example, the colonial policies of the British and French in Africa. They entered the continent when it was a bloody battleground for tribes with never-ending ethnic feuds, who still bore spears, hunted game as their only source of food, and seized any values of greater complexity not through production, but extortion. When the Europeans left, the continent possessed a series of railroads, mining concerns, numerous colleges, schools, and hospitals, urban communities, and a life expectancy which had surged from thirty to its current level of fifty (still infinitesimally small, but an improvement nevertheless). But it was due to the rantings of “anti-imperialists” about the European powers’ infliction of “cultural genocide” by bringing Western civilization into the utility of the locals that a massive withdrawal ensued circa 1950 to 1965, precisely the time when Dewey’s theories were gaining a widespread following and his various sects of disciples, the American socialists, the hippies, and the moral relativists, had launched wave after wave of destructive activism. Because the transition from savage wilderness to cultivated democracy had not been completed in a majority of African territories, the bloodbaths resumed in regions across the continent, from the Mau-Mau terrorism in Kenya to the feudal infighting in Somalia, to Mugabe’s recent expropriations of Caucasian farmers’ land in Zimbabwe, to the Tutsi-Hutu ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, to the Al Qaeda-funding genocide-inflicting dictatorship of al-Bashir in Sudan, just to name a few. That is the Attila-ist chaos which emerges when sniveling academics attempt to suppress the economic freedoms of entrepreneurs.

This issue is an imminent one at present as well, when America may be misled into another foreign policy blunder by the leftists, who seek United States withdrawal from the Middle Eastern arena due to its “imperialistic oil policies” allegedly having fueled the hatred of fanatics like the Al Qaeda. They hold blindly to the assertion that Western nations had been “exploiting” Saudi petroleum and “inconsiderately” erecting military installations in the area. What is the truth? Saudi Arabia would be a barren desert today if businessmen from the United States, Britain, and France had not invested in its oil, built their own derricks, pumped their own “black gold”, and attempted to profit from it. Then the extortionist Wahhabist sheikhs who had produced no values of their own nationalized the industry in the 1950s and employed its monetary flow to fund anti-Western sentiments in Pakistani madrassahs. It was their backward “pragmatism” of plunder which had permitted Islamic extremism to endanger the fundamental infrastructure of our Western society and its values of free enterprise, progress, rights, and consensual trade.  Yet so far few have dared to condemn Saudi Arabia as a foe whose initiation of force requires retaliatory force to preserve the lives and livelihoods of the innocents. Among the courageous are an analyst from the Rand Corporation and the wonderfully rational commentators from the Ayn Rand Institute. But they are facing a wave of self-righteous nihilism directed at them because of their “imperialistic” suggestion that the United States should “take over” another country or even continue its current policy of stationing its military there for self-defense against a genocidal Iraqi tyrant who may soon become endowed with the capacity to launch weapons of mass destruction at America and Israel. The crackpots of the academic paradigm nevertheless warn against the “imperialistic” action of invading Iraq itself!

In summation, the enormous cultural and ideological influence exerted upon our society by Comrade Dewey during the early twentieth century is responsible for a smear campaign which targets not the random marauding and extortion committed by the Montezumas, Mugabes, Saddam Husseins and Osama bin Ladens of the world, but a system of profitable economic investment which entails as a side effect massive increases in the quality of life for denizens of foreign lands. This vile movement opposes the ideals of individual rights, technological development, economic power, and free markets which have been the basis for great nations like the United States while upholding and advocating the aims of stagnation-oriented despots and the “cultural preservation” of the cesspits that are their domain. That is what they truly mean by their vehement hatred of “imperialism”, so allow me to define the term with greater clarity. “Imperialism” is the overseas exercise of civil liberties by denizens of nations which recognize every person’s right to them. The alternative is the rule by the expropriator, the oppressive man who employs brute force instead of industrial production to gain a value. Such a character type was known to Ayn Rand as the “Attila”.