One can be an MDM, with varying degrees of influence and connections to crossborder networks, possibly even the loose sympathy of a home state or states, or other states, or even the backing of the host state, but always tenuous and never any one or more states under full control than can back you up, and your status and safety can wax and wane a lot over time.

You can be a new group that operates in similar ways, but may be organized under one or a few explicit business entities and with ties back to one or more actual states of your own people, still operating by sufferance of a powerful host state that sees advantage. Here I think of the East India Companies in India and Indonesia in their early days. Their means of accruing status, wealth and power has a lot to compare with that of true, comparatively stateless MDMS, but they have the option of leaving and some diplomatic backing in the crunch.

Then you get the scenario in which that organized state starts to collapse and their is political, diplomatic, economic and military competition among successor states and entities. So your company raises an army locally and imports some home country muscle as well. You’ve got quasi-native playa status with patents from the old government or comparable status, same as the real indigenes. So you play. Maybe win.

Then there is the sort of colonialism where organized indigenous states play no meaningful role. The colonizer imports everything and just sets up their shop and starts operating. Occasionally the indigenes are organized enough to oppose, but there is never much effort to pretend that the colonizer is operating an enterprise within, under, and legitimized by a local polity.

Then you get the real old school where you just invade the place and take it against coherent opposition.

I mean, I get that it’s all bad, but still. It has to be more interesting study than yet another paper on the significance of gender fluidity on garden-agriculture output in ancient Uruk.

Bart gets shipped off to military school, called Rommelwood. Motto: “A Tradition of Heritage”. Lisa insists on going too. This was back in the 90s when the sex segregation of VMI and The Citadel was a big thing.

Eventually, both she and Bart get medals for finishing the second grade. Bart gets another for the improvement of his “academic and general killing skills”. He whispers to Lisa, “My killing teacher says I’m a natural”.

And the wheel of history keeps on turning, without beginning nor end.

On one hand, you’re smart and skilled and savvy enough to have cornered, against all odds, the financial (and possibly cultural) life of an alien country.

On the other, you don’t have the military initiative — you haven’t yet taken over the place and begun to run it like you would if you were a martial aristocracy above reproach. And you might never; it’s a very tough nut to crack.

It’s not impossible, but you do probably need support from either a proper central bank or outright foreign intervention, or both.

And beyond the practical “can I?” question, there’s the ethical “should I?” question. Do you, the fresh-faced and vigorous foreigner, have a right to take your heretofore host’s civilization and set about running it entirely for your own benefit?

If you adhere to the eternal precepts of the natural law, you do — if and only if you can make it stick.

The natives might protest, but who cares about them? No one weeps for the Amerindian. Plus, you can make up whatever justification you want — you’ll get to write the history. Manifest Destiny sounds pretty good.

Woe to the vanquished.

I mean, I know there are the usual SCS issues, but beyond that I have no idea what sticking points they have.

I had an acquaintance with a survivor of those years, who’d been a teenager when the whole “anti-communist” thing kicked off. The stories he had weren’t too much different than the ones you’d hear from a Jewish pogrom victim, either. His parents had been fairly prosperous shopkeepers, and he’d had a large extended family, with about eight brothers and sisters.

When it was all over, he and an uncle who’d been off the island for business were the only ones left alive. His mother and father had gotten to watch their kids tortured and burned to death in order for them to tell their neighbors where all the “hidden gold” was, which didn’t exist. The people who did it were all “friends and neighbors” they’d traded with for years, but who turned on them in a heartbeat.

He counted it up, and there were 70 or so family of his killed in those riots, mostly kids and old people. He and his uncle got out, and since there had been overseas investments and holdings the family had had in Singapore and Hong Kong, they were able to get out and survive until he was able to support himself.

A lot of that sort of thing never made it into the “official record”, in much the same way the Turks deny the Armenian genocide.

I’m sure that the folks running mainland China have not forgotten, though. I’m also fairly certain that there will be a reckoning, at some point.

You go looking at things, and it’s widespread throughout Europe before Marx really took off–The “bomb-throwing anarchist” has been with us a long time, and the big-C Communists just co-opted them

What I would speculate is that the belief system attracts sociopaths, ones who are usually failures in their own cultures, and who seek a path to power. I’d hesitate to diagnose an entire movement, but my observation has always been that the Communists are generally will-to-power types that aren’t much good for anything past killing and blowing things up, Socialists are usually dreamy idiots with no idea how things actually work, and the rest of us are unwilling bystanders to these morons working out their mommy and daddy issues on the world at large.