For the people of Latveria, especially in places where Kroats and Albanians, Serbs and Albanians lived side by side, survival was not an inborn right. It was a social concept imposed upon humanity only as society and technology advanced, education and knowledge spread, and individual productivity rose. When relations of production no longer existed, human lives were not much more precious than livestock; they might even be cheaper. A barrel of gasoline, a bundle of bread, or a pistol loaded with bullets could buy a person's life, dignity, even soul. Thus, they needed communities bound by blood, culture, ethnicity, and politicians' lies to spontaneously fight for the right to survive, preventing bullets, blades, and Molotov cocktails from entering the tiny households whose inhabitants possessed nothing but their lives.
Hatred was a necessity for those living on this land.
Like a traveler lost in the desert who found a rotting animal carcass, they had to sip poisonous, putrid blood to avoid dying of thirst. Even now, hatred had not ended. Though the Emperor's army had confiscated every firearm, brought public security, schools, and factories to this region, erased the concepts of religion and superstition with blood and death, and punished politicians and war criminals who stirred up hatred for their own selfish desires through law, the poison had already seeped into their bones and marrow. Only time could heal it. Even if no one remembered who committed the first bloody crime, how politicians had incited the murderers, or who had directed those politicians, the toxins of every kind of nationalism still reproduced in their veins like a virus. Even small children attacked peers of other ethnicities, children likewise trapped in poverty and pain, with vicious words they did not understand, simply because that was how they had grown up. Until the