There's an unending list of countries who are demonized in the US, usually because they run afoul of multinational corporations. Venezuela comes to mind - her only sin has been to partially nationalize her oil industry. (I wonder what would happen if all the oil were turned over to ExxonMobil?) Anyway, there is a long list of countries which have been demonized, only to be moved off the list for a variety of reasons.

Russia. China. North Vietnam, who even beat us in a war and now makes tennis shoes for us. Libya. Cuba.

Clearly they weren't the threat portrayed. Except for North Vietnam, we didn't fight any wars against them, as we did Germany and Japan. And somehow, some way, they are not the center of our attentions. Instead we have North Korea and Iran.

There have been a wide variety of political and economic interests which encouraged the hate, but clearly the threat which was pounded into the heads of every American man, woman and child wasn't there. As the economic interests changed, the political interests changed, and the public was directed to hate others. Such as Venezuela.

That makes one wonder about several matters. First, why were those threats created in the first place? Who profited? And second, what exactly is the validity of the current round of demonization? Conservatives seem to be the most interested, and they are well-known for valuing profit before anything else.

In one of my rare excursions anymore into first-person accounts of Vietnam, and then because it talks about the difficulty of re-entry into The World, one fellow from the Midwest farm country, conservative, gung-ho, a dutiful warrior from a long line of dutiful warriors, an enlisted man who volunteered for the draft says, "I came to understand the Vietnamese, not like them, but understand. I lost every shred of trust and respect for my own government." I believe these phony, dreamed up "threats" from countries such as North Korea and Iran are great reason to not trust.

(I understand the rhetoric coming from those countries. And they are being threatened by large, powerful nations. Iran especially has hostile American armies on both borders. Who wouldn't bluster and threaten in order to try to scare away those folks?)

Arf