Words are inadequate

I keep hearing from people that grudges of a few hundred years are "long-lived". Given the history of the Balkans, or Iceland, or Poland, or many many other countries, this always strikes me as somewhat... Pollyanna-ish, let's say.

Example: I was reading an essay on Iceland's part in the 2008 stock market bubble wherein the author was quoting a Danish expert as saying that he'd warned as many Icelandic financiers as he could that they were doing something irrational, and none of them had listened. And... of course they didn't listen. He was a Dane, and the Danes imposed draconian trade restrictions on Iceland from the 17th century onward, and kept the island mired in poverty and squalor to the point that baldness due to head-fungus was ubiquitous during the 19th century. Head fungus, for fuck's sake.

tl;dr - Given the kinds of things that went down during the English Civil War and in its aftermath, I'm not even remotely surprised that there are still Jacobites hanging around.