Savages

Found this on The Scratching Post this morning:

Going back to the Instapundit post by Sarah that motivated my dive into Comanche history, this quote keeps coming to mind.

(After a deep dive into African history), what became very clear to me is that whenever civilized (in this case defined as post-tribal) humans collide with tribal humans, tribal humans lose. (The tribal people) use the techniques that work in between tribes, imagining that their adversaries are also a tribe:

They start off with unimaginable massacres and horrible evil in the belief that this will cause the adversaries to back off... (T)he more atrocities they commit the more they aggravate the anger of the civilized people.

The civilized hold back, afraid of committing atrocities, and the tribal humans commit more atrocities, and act like victors, while doing truly horrific things.

And then at some point the post-tribal people lose it.

What comes after is usually horrific and causes college social studies majors to cry centuries later.