How did exceptionally violent and bloodthirsty cultures, like Assyria and the Aztecs, successfully exist for any amount of time? Their historical behavior seems so overtly villainous.
>>824841
Ask that to their faces, see what happens.
>>824841
>these guys were really mean and evil! how did they succeed if superheroes exist to stop these evil ppl?
literally fuck off to reddit. no actually fuck off back to minecraft youtubers. you mental 9 year old
>Falling for Hittie propaganda
>my moral standards consider these guys bad, how come societies 4000 years ago didn't share my morals?
Fuck off back to cracked.com
>>824880
Their neighbors thought they were pretty bad too, though.
They don't
1) Everyone else was doing it. Persia became so successful because their entire gimmick was "We're an Empire, but NOT the Assyrians/Babylonians/Basically-Every-Semitic-Group-Around-At-The-Time". Flaying people alive sounds horrible to us because no one does it; if it was the basic punishment for theft in every Western country, you'd probably not give a fuck if someone got flayed alive.
2) Along with their intense brutality came economic excess and comfort. Sure, every month they take five hundred screaming captured child slaves up on top of the pyramid and torture them to death so Qoqutotifpqozotequtotuqooqlp can fight the star fish demons who live beyond space and time. So what? You're not only fed, but have money in your pocket, your investments are paying off, your son is succeeding in school, and your wife just popped out your fifth healthy child.
3) They were rarely that (needlessly) brutal with themselves. It's one thing to flay the victims of conquest alive; it's an entirely different thing to flay your own people alive. Much of the violence the Aztecs committed was during their regular harvests of the barbarian tribes around their city states, for example. Violence against Aztecs was not nearly as common as violence against the "lesser" people.
>>824841
Certain european countries still flayed alive their anemies up to the 16th or 17th centuries
>>824841
all that over-the-top brutality made them look intimidating as fuck.
>>824909
>torture them to death so Qoqutotifpqozotequtotuqooqlp ...
That's hurtful man. All I ever wanted was to absorb the blood of thousands of humans to stay alive.
>>825317
Also, my name is pronounced Tez-kat-li poh-ka.
Last reference to me was in February. I think there should be more references to me on /his/, and if you liked what you heard, I also perform for weddings and birthday parties...
>>824841
People are used to it. Seriously. Remember that this is the norm for most of pre-Columbian history in all the Americas, and the norm for most of Asia and Europe at least 'til 1000 AD or so. The Nazcas were burying babies and cuttin' people up without having ever heard of the Aztecs. Phoenicians, from the same cultural stock as the Israelites, sacrificed their babies. The Japanese used to do human sacrifice for the sake of architecture up until the late medieval period. China used to castrate people by the tens of thousands, bury scholars alive, death by a thousand cuts, etc.
Murdering people over nothing, tremendous torture, all this stuff is the norm, man. Even after 1000 AD, it only seems different because of the philosophical or logical excuses provided. The Inquisition isn't that much more or less gruesome than Assyrian barbarism. Same with Leopold's Congo state, or slavery. Genghis Khan, Timur, the terrible shit the Mughals did. Shall I go on?
I wouldn't say villainous, a lot of those cultures and obviously the successful nomadic cultures always reminded me of the demeanor of biker gangs, wherein the culture is composed of people with a natural disposition towards having less hesitation to commuting to violence, as a group of interpersonally. A lot of successfully using violent means is how quickly on commits themselves to it. Between two hypothetical people who are generally equally skilled in fighting/boxing or someshit most of the time the one who commits to an attack/bold enough action first while the other is more hesitant simply out of contemplating the possibilities of the fight, the first to commit to a nice, while maybe not as well thought through as what the second would eventually arrive at, will generally get the upper hand.
Impart that into an entire group and you will have people the eventually gain experience from coming out on top, so now you have a double whammy of more experience an an inbuilt willingness to take the initiative.
Changed in modern times of conflict where blind initiative had to be tempered with more consideration of strategy.
>>824841
When the Aztecs started they were not as violent and blood thirsty as in their later days, they had the standard amount of sacrifices and blood rituals than other cultures around them, since they pretty much took their culture and religion from bits of everyone else's cultures.
At first the Aztecs would actually sacrifice their children and their own in their rituals since that was how it worked, and it would be in way less quantities, only a few guys for each event, a ceremony for the water god, Tlaloc, only required one child to be offered for example.
But then they started to take ground, they were able to kick their former bosses, who they paid tribute to, off of the valley, started conquering surrounding territory and then went into a power trip, to the point that one Aztec high priest decided to burn their own codices that showed their real origins and celestial stuff, and rewrote everything putting the Aztecs as pretty much the master race and the choosen people.
By that time they were already too big to be defeated by most of their enemies, and then they started to us sacrificies not only for rituals but also with the goal of controlling other tribes' populations and army numbers by forcing them into constant ritualistic warfare and inviting foreign diplomats to their events were they would sacrifice hundres of people in one simple party as a way of showing off their might and cruelty, "You mess with us, we put your entire nation down in one day while we dance and sing, now lets eat and get drink friend".
So yeah, the Aztecs weren't always as bloody, it took a while for them to become the Aztecs we see on the records of the Spaniards, and it was not just being evil for the sake of being evil, but sacrifices became a major part of their way of controlling their lands and keeping their enemies at bay.
>>824841
>How did smart and powerful civilisations rule for so long?
I hope this is a joke.
>>825389
>Phoenicians sacrificed their babies
Memes, the tophets actually were cemetary for mostly un born children, it's been proved recently.
Because they were violent and bloodthirsty. Why do you think the romans dominated the Mediterranean?
>>824888
Probably because it was affecting their people. Much like how the English created this image of the brutal uncivilsed Danes, even though they themselves tried multiple times to genocide the Danes living in Danelaw.
