When I was growing up, we were taught in school that North Koreans, and especially the North Korean leadership, were all devils.
While it is true that our enemies are ruthless fanatics, the solution is not for us to become zealous ourselves so that we remake our society in the image of those that would attack us.
Putin has built a mobilisation society, his sky high popularity numbers, which Donald Trump so envies, are fully dependent on being able to mobilise the population against an enemy and that imagined enemy is the United States.
The general perception, in much of the Middle East, is that the United States is an unreliable friend and a harmless enemy. I think we want to give the exact opposite impression.
In North Korea, we learnt all Americans are the enemy; they are not human.
When ideas lead to ideology, that's a very dangerous thing. Ideology then leads to creating the image of an enemy, and it leads to the murder and massacre.
After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.
If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."
A foreign threat is useful to put things in order in one's own camp, to make one's allies follow the bloc discipline. Iran does not fit this role too well, and it is very tempting to revive Russia's image of the enemy. But nobody in Europe is afraid anymore.
I don't think Americans realize the degree to which they are the main subject of Russian television news. Every night there's news from the United States and scandals about the United States, and every night the United States is shown to be an enemy of Russia over and over and over again. And this is, of course, useful to the Russian president, because it's, we have this big and important enemy - you need me here to fight back.
A democracy soon becomes a victim of its own propaganda ... Its enemy become the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue.
The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc.
The sordid qualities imputed to the enemy are always those which we recognize as our own and therefore rise to slay, because only through projection do we realize the enormity and horror of them.
The problem is that Iran has been identified as a dangerous enemy, and the longer the media forwards that proposition - and the media is guilty, just as it was in the Iraq war - then the easier it becomes for Americans to accept that we might just have to resort to military force to remove any Iranian threat.
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world.
When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.
To effectively create the image of an enemy you have to show first of all that the enemy is extremely dangerous, but on the other hand less than human.
