Enemy creation constructs a threatening out-group and blames it for a society’s problems, using the manufactured enemy to unify, energize, and direct an in-group. It is among the oldest and most dangerous techniques in the propagandist’s repertoire because it solves two problems at once: it offers a simple, emotionally satisfying explanation for complex hardship, and it forges group solidarity out of shared opposition. Edward Bernays observed in Propaganda (1928) that organizing loyalties around symbols is far easier than organizing them around reasoned argument; a common enemy is the most efficient such symbol, because it converts anxiety directly into cohesion.
The technique works by exploiting a deep feature of human social cognition — the readiness to sort the world into in-group and out-group, and to extend trust inward and suspicion outward. Jacques Ellul argued that effective propaganda does not invent feelings so much as channel pre-existing tensions toward a target the propagandist chooses. When genuine grievance exists — economic insecurity, cultural change, fear of crime — enemy creation supplies a face for the pain. Dehumanizing language does the heavy lifting: once a group is framed as vermin, disease, or invaders rather than as people, the ordinary moral brakes on how they may be treated loosen. That is why the escalation ladder is so consistent across history, running from rhetoric to exclusion to, at its extreme, persecution and violence.
Crucially, the story is engineered to resist verification. Because the enemy is blamed regardless of the facts — contradicting evidence is reframed as the enemy’s cunning or a co-conspirator’s cover — the narrative becomes unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiability is the manipulator’s tell. This connects to the book’s governing diagnostic: honest claims get stronger when you slow down and check them, while enemy narratives weaken or lash out when examined. A citizen encountering the technique will notice that the proposed solutions aim at the people rather than at the stated problem — that unemployment is to be solved by removing a group rather than by addressing labor markets, that crime is to be solved by targeting an identity rather than by addressing its drivers.
Defense is both analytical and emotional. Analytically, insist on systemic explanations and falsifiable claims: ask what evidence would change the story, and watch whether remedies actually address the grievance’s mechanism. Emotionally, the harder work is noticing when your own sense of belonging has come to depend on opposition — because that dependency is precisely the handle the technique grips. Validating a real hardship while rejecting the assigned scapegoat is the move that disarms enemy creation without dismissing the pain it feeds on.