It’s a Tribal Conflict
By Victor Rosenthal
Humans have always arranged themselves into families, extended families, and tribes. After all, they are primates, and many other primate species act similarly. Sometimes tribes clash over a piece of territory. Maybe the ground is fertile or the hunting is good. When that happens, the tribes fight. If there are other tribes nearby, each side may seek allies to help them win. This is the way human beings behave.
We think we are different today. We are not. Usually one tribe is the aggressor and one is the victim. The goal of the aggressor is to take what the victim has: property and land, and sometimes to enslave the useful members of the victim tribe. Some tribes have been very successful in serial aggressions, even building empires as they sweep across the land, employing techniques of aggression that they improve with successive conquests. The Arab conquests of the 7th century and the Mongols of the 13th come to mind.
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