>That was the next country set, after the one I'm talking about was dismantled by who knows whose political will.
>
>Perhaps being "merry" and peaceful isn't enough in that case. Perhaps you also need the ability to fight off malign external forces that are apparently to blame whenever something goes wrong.

I've read somewhere, during those years, that it takes only 10% of the population to be pro-war, to push a country into one.

And I've heard accounts from refugees. They'd be assigned a command from "their" side to fight the neighboring village, which was on "other" side. They'd strike a deal with the "enemy" and pretend to fight every day for a few hours, until the lamb on the spit was done, then they'd just sit together and eat it. Sooner or later someone up there would get wind of it, send a bunch of commandos, who'd sneak into the village, fire a few grenades into the other village, and voila - they were now really fighting each other.

Too bad it went that way. In another twenty years the generation which remembered what the "other side" did in WWII would have died off and the whole bunch of bad feelings which were left under the carpet would have atrophied. But it was the weak spot of each communist party I know of, that it never had proper defenses from the thugs in its own ranks. And by the time of the nineties, the thugs have taken over. So they helped each other screw the country several times over, just to remain in power.