The Machinery of Projection: Europe, the Crusades, and the Ritual of the Enemy

The Crusade begins not with a sword, but with a wound that will not heal.

Before a single banner is raised or a city put to the torch, there is first a sickness in the soul of a people—a sense that something has gone rotten at home, an anxiety that trembles in the marrow, unspoken and unbearable. In that hour, the easiest solution is to name the enemy outside. Call it heretic, infidel, witch, or migrant; paint its face on the horizon and promise the multitudes that redemption is only a campaign away.

This is the machinery of projection, the dark engine of European history. It has worn many uniforms and spoken in tongues both sacred and profane, but always its logic is the same: offload the pain, export the violence, transmute guilt into righteous bloodlust. The Crusades are only the most cinematic expression of this ritual, but the pattern is older than any Pope and more resilient than any king.

The genius of the first Crusade was not in its strategy, but in its timing. Medieval Europe was choking on its own violence—knights with no wars left to fight, peasants with no fields left to till, a Church fat with fear and ambition. The solution was not to heal, but to hunt: send the discontented east, sanctify their killing, baptize their resentment in the blood of strangers.

This ritual did not end at Jerusalem. It reinvented itself in every century: the pogrom, the colonial war, the modern crusade against whoever could be cast as the enemy of the age. And each time, the wound at home only deepened, covered now by the ashes of a new enemy, a new lie.

The lesson is older than Europe, and as close as our own resentments: what you do not face in yourself, you will seek to destroy in another. The real war is always with the sickness within. The rest is theater, holy and profane.

Chapter 1: The Enemy as Salvation

The first instinct of a wounded tribe is not confession but accusation. A people burdened by failure, shame, or hunger seldom turns inward; it looks for an enemy to deliver them from themselves. In this, Europe was merely the most articulate, the most theologically gifted, of all the civilizations that have tried to sanctify projection.

To invent the enemy is to grant yourself the illusion of innocence. Every system in crisis seeks its scapegoat; every power in decline seeks the purifying flame of righteous violence. If the city is starving, it must be the Jew who poisoned the well. If the fields are barren, it must be the witch who cursed the harvest. If faith grows thin and kings grow fat, then surely the infidel east must be plotting, their very existence a reproach to Christendom.

This logic is not uniquely European. But nowhere did it become so formal, so ornate, so married to the sacred and the bureaucratic, as in the West. The machinery of projection—law, liturgy, sword, and rumor—became the operating system of an entire continent. To be European, at the dawn of the first Crusade, was to live inside a psychology of exorcism: the enemy outside promised to heal the sickness within.

When Pope Urban II called his council at Clermont, he did not speak of land, of politics, or even of salvation in its true sense. He spoke of rescue, of brotherhood, of liberating what was holy from what was profane. But the liberation he offered was not for Jerusalem—it was for Europe, from Europe itself. He promised not just the forgiveness of sins, but the permission to channel violence away from the motherland, to burn the rot in foreign soil.

This is the real genius of projection: it feels like a solution. To direct the fever outward is to create, for a season, the illusion of health. Knights starving for glory found a crusade; peasants starving for bread found a scapegoat; priests starving for certainty found a script. The machinery whirred, blood was spilled, and for a generation, the sickness at home was replaced by the spectacle of violence abroad.

The enemy as salvation is the oldest heresy. It is the inversion of every true spiritual teaching, which always begins with the wound, not the sword. The prophet tells you to confess. The crusader tells you to conquer. The church, when it wants to survive at any cost, will always choose the latter and call it grace.

And so, the theater is set: the enemy defined, the violence sanctified, the wound denied. The story repeats itself in every age. The only thing that changes is the name of the scapegoat and the sophistication of the machinery.

Chapter 2: The First Crusade: Exporting the Rot

It is comforting to remember the First Crusade as a sudden eruption of piety, an ecstatic march of the faithful answering heaven’s call. But history—when stripped of its pageantry—reveals a simpler, uglier script. The Crusade was less a pilgrimage than a purge; less about faith, more about venting a sickness Europe could neither confess nor cure.

By the close of the eleventh century, Europe was a landscape of restless violence. The fields had grown crowded. The younger sons of nobility—landless, restless, and bred to war—roamed in bands, their swords unburdened by purpose. Peasants starved or rebelled. The aristocracy played its games of blood and betrayal, while the Church, rich but anxious, presided over a civilization whose violence was threatening to come home.

The rot was not abstract. It was structural, cellular—a continent addicted to conflict, unable to direct its energies toward healing or justice, only ever toward conquest or expulsion. The wound bled within each court, each village, each heart: a sense of perpetual danger, a fear that if the violence were not exiled, it would consume them all from within.

Into this malaise stepped Urban II, a pope more strategist than saint. He gathered the powerful at Clermont and delivered what every frightened elite longs to hear: that their darkness was not only forgivable, but sanctifiable —if only it could be redirected. The Council’s words dripped with theology, but its genius was political: a license for slaughter, blessed by the Church, but always to be performed on foreign soil.

The call to arms was a call to catharsis. All debts could be paid in blood, all sins erased by marching east. Crusade became the technology of European self-preservation—a way to vent the accumulated rage of generations on the body of the Other. The violence was exported, the rot was externalized, and for a brief, bloody season, Europe could imagine itself holy.

There is a grim clarity in these mechanics. When a society can neither admit its sickness nor heal it, it must invent a channel, a sewer, a scapegoat. The First Crusade was that channel, dressed up as destiny. The violence that could not be faced at home became the business of liberation abroad. The knights marched, the crosses gleamed, and somewhere behind the banners, the wound of Europe deepened, covered by a layer of holy ash.

Exporting the rot does not cure it. It only buries it deeper, in the hope that the body politic will forget the stench. But trauma, like resentment, does not vanish. It migrates. It adapts. The machinery of projection, once built, demands ever-new fuel. The First Crusade was not a singular event, but the first successful test of a system—a ritual that Europe would perfect, then unleash, in ever more elaborate forms.

Chapter 3: The Gospel of Violence

No one kills more righteously than those who believe they do it for purity. The Crusades did not simply export European violence; they sacralized it, built an entire theology on the blood of others, and named it redemption. What began as a strategy of political survival became, over centuries, the gospel of violence—a liturgy in which every massacre could be justified by the hunger for cleansing.

The rhetoric was always purification: purging the infidel, redeeming the land, exorcising the demon. But every holy war requires a theater, a scapegoat, a script. The Church provided all three. Crusade sermons did not just promise forgiveness—they promised that killing the enemy was itself a path to God. Every sword became a sacrament, every corpse a step closer to the kingdom. The crowd roared approval, not in the language of sorrow, but in the language of rebirth through fire.

This was not an aberration but a template, perfected and repeated. When there were no Muslims to be purged, there were heretics. When heretics ran dry, there were Jews. When Jews could not be found, witches. Every society that builds its identity on exclusion, every faith that forgets the agony of its own prophets, will always require a new body for the altar. The machinery was built to be universal, scalable, endlessly renewable.

The genius—and the horror—of the gospel of violence is that it inverts every true spiritual teaching. Where the prophet calls for inward reckoning, the machinery of projection calls for outward slaughter. Where Jesus teaches, “Love your enemy,” the Crusader answers, “Destroy them for God.” Where the mystics say, “Die to yourself,” the zealots say, “Kill for the cause.” The result is a moral universe turned inside out—a world where the greatest proof of faith is the capacity to destroy.

The violence is not random. It is bureaucratized, ritualized, woven into the fabric of law, liturgy, and governance. Popes issue indulgences, kings grant pardons, chroniclers record massacres as miracles. The faith becomes spectacle; the spectacle becomes faith. By the time the blood dries, the memory has already been sanctified, and the machinery prepares for its next operation. What the Crusades revealed, and what Europe perfected, is that no violence is so enduring as the violence committed in the name of the sacred. Once the ritual of projection is established, it outlives its founders. It becomes the ghost in the national machine, the secret text behind every public prayer. The gospel of violence is older than Christianity and will outlast it, unless the machinery itself is named, confessed, and dismantled.

But rarely do those who inherit such machinery dare to face it. It is easier to praise the heroism of the past, easier to chant the slogans of purity, than to admit that the violence was always meant to cleanse the self by wounding the world.

Chapter 4: Echoes: From Pogrom to Holocaust

Every machine, if left to run long enough, turns upon its maker. The logic of the Crusade—the projection of evil outward, the promise of redemption by violence—cannot be confined to foreign soil forever. The ritual migrates home. The machinery that once required the blood of infidels soon demands new fuel: the neighbor, the stranger, the citizen marked as different.

After Jerusalem, after the holy land was drenched in righteous murder, the machinery of projection required a closer enemy. The Crusaders, denied the endless feast of foreign war, returned home with bloodied hands and hungry souls. The pattern shifted, but the logic held: to preserve the imagined purity of the body politic, a scapegoat must always be found.

In the Rhineland, as Crusader armies gathered to march east, they turned first on the Jews of their own towns— slaughtering entire communities under banners meant for Jerusalem. It was not a detour, but a harbinger. Europe’s obsession with the enemy outside would always metastasize inward, consuming those who could not escape or assimilate. The pogrom is the Crusade come home, the machinery of projection repurposed for domestic use.

Across the centuries, the scapegoat shifted but the need remained: Jews, heretics, Roma, witches—each generation assigned a new face to the ancient wound. The machinery of bureaucracy learned new tricks; the rhetoric of purification adapted to new anxieties. The Inquisition, the ghetto, the expulsion, the ritual humiliation —all iterations of the same algorithm: cleanse the land, heal the self by wounding the other.

The Holocaust was not a rupture in this story. It was its perfection—Europe’s own machinery, finally unleashed at industrial scale against the people it had always marked as its internal other. The gas chamber is not a relic of pagan barbarism; it is the endpoint of a Christian logic that could not bear to reckon with its own wounds. The same liturgical precision that organized crusade armies now counted train schedules, rationed poison, calculated the arithmetic of annihilation.

The world called it madness, but it was the opposite: a cold, meticulous clarity, the culmination of centuries spent perfecting the art of killing in the name of wholeness. In the ashes of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the lie of the external enemy was finally exposed for what it had always been—a mask for the wound that could not be healed by violence, only deepened by it.

But history’s machinery does not stop with its victims. The trauma migrates, the logic mutates. The survivors, scarred by the machinery, are handed a new land, a new promise, and—unwittingly, inevitably—the tools of projection. Thus the wound is exported once again, eastward, into new flesh, new memory. The echo continues, barely disguised.

Europe’s darkness did not end in 1945. It simply shifted its weight, handed off its weapons, and taught the world how to sanctify resentment at scale. The lesson remains: what is not confessed will be repeated, and what is denied at home will be reborn abroad.

Chapter 5: Trauma’s Migration: Israel and the New Jerusalem

What Europe could not bury in itself, it exported. The machinery of projection—honed on a thousand pogroms, perfected in the camps—found new life not just in memory, but in geography. The catastrophe of the Holocaust did not simply empty Europe of its Jews; it displaced the wound, rerouting trauma from the heart of Christendom to the ancient hills of Jerusalem.

The story the West tells itself is one of atonement: that in gifting a homeland to the survivors, it righted a wrong. But history, when told without sentimentality, reveals a transfer, not a healing. The land was not empty. The story was not clean. A people shattered by centuries of exclusion was delivered, by the logic of empire and guilt, into a land already inhabited, already beloved, already scarred by its own cycles of conquest and loss.

The founding of Israel was never simply the return of an ancient people to their promised home. It was the migration of European trauma—trauma that had learned, over centuries, to survive by projection, to define itself by the enemy, to see safety as the mastery of threat. The machinery arrived disguised as necessity: borders drawn, walls raised, the logic of siege and survival embedded in every policy. The wound, unhealed, began to write law, build checkpoints, name new enemies.

This is not a question of blame but of inheritance. Victims, when denied healing, can become custodians of the machinery that broke them. The cycle is not moral, but structural: those entrusted with the memory of suffering often inherit, along with their wounds, the tools of exclusion. The displaced become the displacers, and the haunted become the builders of new enclosures.

In the New Jerusalem, the old logic found new targets: the Arab, the Muslim, the refugee whose presence threatens the story of safety, the illusion of innocence. Resentment became law, fear became border, memory became weapon. What was once a theology of survival hardened into a strategy of dominance—each generation forgetting, by necessity, the original agony that birthed its power.

There is no neat resolution here. The machinery of projection, once set in motion, is indifferent to the sincerity of its operators. The suffering that should have taught solidarity instead calcifies into new hierarchies; the trauma that should have bred empathy instead erects new walls. This is the bitter legacy of unprocessed pain: it demands not confession but reenactment, not healing but repetition.

The Holy Land is holy not for its miracles, but for its wounds. Every stone is engraved with cycles of conquest and return, every olive tree testifies to the memory of loss. The tragedy is not just that trauma migrated—it is that it set up shop, trained new keepers, and wrote new rituals for the old machinery. The pattern endures, waiting for a confession that never comes.

Chapter 6: The Lesson Refused: The AA Principle

If Europe had been able to join a meeting and tell the truth, history would be a different place. But nations do not do inventories. Institutions do not make amends. The machinery of projection is built precisely to prevent such reckonings. Instead of seeing their own part, they see only the enemy—over and over, in new costumes, on new soil. Alcoholics-anonymous names resentment as the “number one offender”—a poison that sickens the soul and warps the world. The lesson is unambiguous: “Whenever we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.” In AA, you learn the paradox: the only way out is through your own shadow. The only enemy you must defeat is the one you carry.

Spiritual traditions echo this in every tongue. “Remove the beam from your own eye.” “Know thyself.” “Sweep your own side of the street.” Yet the machinery of empire runs on denial—its power is fueled by the refusal to look inward. What would it mean for a civilization to do a fourth step? What would it cost to write down, without evasion, the harms done in the name of safety and purity?

The answer is always too much. The fear is that honest inventory will dissolve the bonds of the group, that admitting the wound will invite the return of chaos. So the system chooses denial. Resentment becomes the glue of belonging. Hatred is passed down as heritage. Enemies are cultivated like crops, harvested whenever the inner soil grows barren.

In the rooms of recovery, the lesson is merciless but liberating: you are not unique. Your story of pain is not an excuse to wound others. To blame the world is to remain sick; to face your own side of the street is the beginning of freedom.

The world outside those rooms is rarely so brave. Nations, faiths, and movements invest everything in the lie of righteous grievance. Leaders rise by naming new enemies, institutions grow strong by selling the fantasy that healing can be achieved through conquest. The machinery of projection is always more attractive than the quiet, humiliating work of confession.

True faith—the kind that survives catastrophe—begins with the courage to say, “I was wrong.” But the history of violence, from the Crusades to the present, is a history of the lesson refused. Until the machinery breaks, until resentment is unmasked as a sickness of the self, the ritual will continue, and the enemy will always be waiting on the horizon.

Chapter 7: Holy War Without God

A crusade does not require faith, only hunger. The modern age inherited the machinery of projection, but shed the scaffolding of belief. The sword remains, the banner still unfurls, but the name of God is now just a costume for newer gods: security, nation, market, tribe. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ritual of the enemy survived its theology, thriving precisely where faith collapsed into spectacle.

Those who wage holy war today are rarely true believers. They are, more often, hollow men—addicted to noise, masters of slogan and outrage, estranged from any interior life. They invoke religion not as discipline or reverence, but as an amplifier for resentment, an accelerant for violence. The greatest violence of the age is always justified as defense: defense of democracy, defense of identity, defense of the traumatized self.

This is the era of holy war without holiness—a theater of endless campaign, televised and streamed, in which the only real faith is in the machinery itself. The war on terror, the war for land, the war for narrative supremacy: each is waged with the old liturgies, minus the courage to confess doubt or seek repentance. The rituals of old—penance, inventory, sacrifice—are replaced by the ritual of permanent enemy, the sacrament of perpetual outrage.

In America, the machinery is bipartisan. The religious right blesses bombs over Gaza and baptizes nationalism in prophecy, not out of spiritual conviction but as a hedge against emptiness. The secular left, for all its sermons on justice, finds its own crusades—hunting heresy online, purifying the community with digital fire. Both pray to the same hidden god: resentment sanctified as righteousness.

Israel, the new Jerusalem, is perhaps the most honest inheritor of this ritual. The myth of innocence is policed by force; the story of perpetual threat is the heart of national liturgy. Those who raise questions are branded traitors or self-haters; those who name the machinery are cast out. In the absence of healing, the wound is weaponized—trauma becomes identity, and violence is justified as self-preservation.

Holy war without God is a feast without blessing. Its only sacrament is projection; its only ritual, the invention of the next enemy. It has no room for confession, no patience for self-examination, no curiosity about what might grow if the sword were ever laid down. The machinery has no need of faith, only fuel. So long as resentment endures, the ritual will continue—an endless, empty pageant performed for a god who has already left the building.

Chapter 8: The Ritual of Resentment

Resentment is not simply a feeling—it is an organizing principle, a ritual, a way of binding a people to one another in the absence of love. If confession is too dangerous, and genuine faith too costly, then resentment offers a cheap alternative: the ecstasy of shared grievance, the catharsis of a common enemy. It is the yeast in the bread of mass movements, the silent engine beneath every witch hunt, every pogrom, every war that promises to save the soul by punishing the body.

This is not new. The ancient texts tell the same story, only with different names for the scapegoat. What is new is the scale, the speed, the relentless efficiency of the machinery. What once required the labor of rumor and sermon now thrives on algorithms, trending topics, and the global market for outrage. Societies are governed, not by dreams of wholeness, but by rituals of purification—the endless hunt for the impurity that explains the malaise, the evil that excuses our own sickness.

The psychology is simple and devastating. As long as resentment is externalized—always someone else’s fault, always an enemy to vanquish—there is no need to reckon with the shadow inside. The enemy becomes a stage for our own unacknowledged shame. The machinery of projection gives each participant a role: the priest who sanctifies, the mob who purifies, the politician who directs the traffic of hatred. Everyone is forgiven, except the one who asks the forbidden question: What if the real sickness is ours?

No society is immune. The left invents heretics; the right invents traitors; the center invents outsiders. The machinery demands constant fuel. New enemies must be found, new rituals rehearsed, or the group must risk collapse into self-examination. It is easier to march, easier to post, easier to denounce, than to look in the mirror and mourn.

This is why the machinery endures: it solves the problem of meaning, not by healing but by dividing. It forges identity through negation, community through exclusion. Resentment feels good—until it doesn’t. Then the cycle renews: another enemy, another purge, another story of innocence restored through violence.

The lesson, whispered by every ruined city and every mass grave, is always the same. What is unconfessed will be repeated. What is denied will be reborn in new forms. The ritual of resentment offers the comfort of belonging, but only at the price of blindness. Until the machinery is named, until the spell is broken, the world will keep inventing enemies—each one a mirror, each one a chance at the healing we continue to refuse.

Chapter 9: Refusing the Lie

The ritual can be broken, but only by truth. History does not redeem itself; the machinery of projection does not stop on its own. It demands interruption, a refusal to play the part assigned, a willingness to forfeit the ecstasy of belonging in exchange for the quiet work of reckoning. The courage required is not theatrical—it is humble, humiliating, and mostly invisible. It is the courage to mourn, to confess, to step outside the ritual and refuse the lie that the enemy is ever somewhere else.

There is a reason so few choose this path. It is easier to fight for purity than to face contamination; easier to condemn than to repent. To clean your side of the street is to risk seeing what you have become, to risk the loss of innocence that projection always promises to preserve. The machinery seduces with certainty: “If only they were gone, I would be whole.” But the wound, unhealed, simply finds another name, another scapegoat, another war. Refusing the lie is not a passive act. It is not resignation, but rebellion—the decision to step out of the pageant, to name the machinery, to witness what it does to the soul. It is the refusal to join the next crusade, the next digital lynching, the next campaign for purity by subtraction. It is the willingness to love a nation, a people, a faith by knowing its ghosts, holding its wounds, speaking its secrets aloud.

The way out is not grand, but granular: inventories taken in silence, amends made without applause, histories written without the comforting armor of heroism. It is the work of those who choose presence over spectacle, confession over accusation, and the slow unlearning of belonging through hate.

Every age presents its machinery. Every age tempts us to trade truth for security, confession for resentment. The lesson of every ruined crusade, every emptied ritual, every history we would rather not remember, is that the enemy is never only out there. The lie endures only as long as we let it. The refusal begins wherever someone, anyone, cleans their side of the street and dares to mourn what cannot be recovered.

There is no final victory, only the ongoing discipline of truth. But if enough refuse the lie, if enough dismantle the machinery in their own house, the world may yet remember how to heal. Until then, the street waits—uncleaned, honest, and holy in its wounds.

Epilogue

History ends, and then it does not. The machinery grinds on, repainted for a new era, fitted with new operators and new rationales. We inherit the echoes of old wars, the silences left by unburied grief. The line between victim and perpetrator, sacred and profane, is drawn and redrawn until it is only a shadow across the ground. The crusade becomes the pogrom becomes the checkpoint becomes the tweet. The pageant adapts; the wound persists.

I have written this not as an indictment, but as a reckoning. To love a nation, or a people, or a faith, is not to shield it from the truth, but to hold its ghosts with unflinching eyes. I am haunted by what we refuse to confess, the cost of every enemy invented, the tenderness wasted in service of machinery. I am not innocent, and neither is anyone who has lived inside the comfort of a group, the reassurance of story, the narcotic of resentment.

If there is hope, it is small and stubborn. It lives in every inventory made in secret, every apology that interrupts the cycle, every refusal to name a scapegoat when the crowd demands it. It lives wherever someone chooses to mourn rather than accuse, to speak a forbidden truth rather than pass down another myth.

The machinery will outlast us, but so will the possibility of refusal. In the quiet hours, when no one is watching, the work of cleaning our side of the street is the beginning of something else—something fragile, unfinished, and holy. If enough of us remember, perhaps the ritual will break. Perhaps we will find, beneath the ash and the noise, the world waiting to be forgiven.

—Elias Winter
Author of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.