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Comment by bsiemon | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to think about these trans-national corporations fighting wars and then signing peace treaties. Used to be only nation states did that.

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Nah, private companies have got involved in that kind of thing since forever:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

UFC : The Chiquita banana company who lobbied for the "1954 Guatemalan coup d'état" - an operation to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan government. Why? The elected president policies were a threat to UFC's exploitative labor practices. CIA involved, Guatemalan government overthrown, dictatorial rule, civil war for decades.

The CIA even launched another operation to find the Soviet influence in Guatemala to justify the coup. The operation was a failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27état

And the same kind of practices where done in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Perú, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, to name a few.

The nice thing is that these wars are now fought in boardrooms rather than battlefields.

And for the "fighting wars" part, let's not forget this one:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes

They were quite effective, too.

Early corporations fought wars against nation states, peoples, and became sovereign entities. Like the East India Company.

That's a little bit cheating because VOC was backed by the Dutch government, but there were a lot of wars in southeast Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries that came about because of company activity.

That's a long way to stretch an analogy to make a political point. Were there armies? Soldiers equipped to kill?

Or was this a legal dispute of the sort that companies have been engaging in since the invention of companies, and individuals have been engaging in since the invention of the court?

Armies of lawyers I guess. Don't need soldiers if someone else is doing the enforcing.

I mean you are right that in absence of a judicial system and the monopoly on violence exercised by nation states and supranational treaties, a conflict such as this could have been violent.

Thankfully that world is far away.

Didn’t sound like a political point to me, just a reflective/thoughtful comparison.

I am pretty sure Samsung could mobilize a smaller army, with all the millitary gear they make.

The world has started to resemble cyberpunk more and more over the years...

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