I don't think there's an antidote to it: it's cynical and shaped by commentary by accepted propaganda mouthpieces. I'm not even entirely sure how applicable it is to modern conflicts: it applies to things like WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam wars, where even regarding the designated "enemy" there's a more tacit acceptance of formal state forces than insurgent groups, like the VC gets demonized by Americans while nobody talks about the formal North Vietnamese army, but in more modern conflicts it seems like this idea has shifted to "enemy bad and illegitimate, whoever we like good and legitimate" in a way that doesn't distinguish between state and non-state actors, which makes me think this is more shaped by formal propaganda than some innate "formally accepted violence man violence good, non-formally accepted violence man violence bad" phenomenon.

Like you can't really inoculate a population, and especially cynical jingoists, against the stance of the formally accepted propaganda mouthpieces.

One could probably tie this to how the FRG/modern Germany and Occupied Korea each consider/considered their counterpart to be fundamentally an illegitimate insurgency against their authority, or how the really terminal liberals try to insist on describing Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government even in contravention of the US's own position, and how the entire liberal idea of a legitimate state is at once paramount in their geopolitical worldview and at the same entirely cynical and shaped by what they're told to believe, but I'm already too drunk to articulate what I'm trying to say here so I'm not sure I can follow this thread of thought to fruition.