The Balkans are a different place. Grudges are held close to the heart there; villages hold beefs with each other that go back centuries. But then, once a foreign invader steps in, everyone bands together and fights like mad fury to defeat them. Then they go back to their regularly scheduled beef.

“Those who came to destroy us” could be pretty much anyone. Nowadays if a Kosovo Albanian is saying it, it probably means the Serbians, but frankly, there is a laundry list of foreign invaders who met sharp pointy things in the Balkans since the time of Alexander.

The Middle East shares some of this mindset, and the Caucuses region of the Western Asian steppes. Wrong them once, and they remember. It’s something we have to remember when asking ourselves why an agreement that may seem obvious to us is so intractable among the parties in these places.

But man, they do love them some KFC.