It never ends...IS Militants Burn Three Iraqis Alive

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10. There are a lot of competing theories about why the Aztec empire fell.

If I'm recalling this correctly, it was a puzzle for a long time because they had a vast empire and enormous power. But they committed some ghastly human rights abuses, including cannibalism and human sacrifice. Eventually, the scale of these abuses became so bad that there was a popular revolution - people realized they were going to be sacrificed, as would their own families, and they decided to put an end to it before that happened, since either way, they'd end up better off.

A similar type of social collapse helped lead to the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm seeing parallels between those societies and the kind of thing in the story here.