Blood in the Snow

The imposing complex now known as Windsor Castle began as an offensive outpost for the Norman conquest of England. I’ve heard that the Normans were innovators in using castles not to defend territory but to subdue it in the first place. With your castle and your horse-mounted soldiers, you could crush local opposition swiftly and fully.

Even after the age of the castle waned, Windsor was a prominent center of royal power. That is presumably why the original version of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents, acquired by Charles II, hangs in the King’s Closet there.

I say “original,” but the painting tests the boundaries of the term. It is his treatment of the episode in Matthew’s Gospel where a fearful King Herod has all the children of Bethlehem murdered in an attempt to snuff out the infant Jesus, whom he sees as a threat to his rule. It has been extensively painted over, such that the numerous copies (which can be seen in Munich, Vienna, Brussels, and even Banbury) actually show you the original conception much more clearly than the version that comes from Bruegel’s own hand.

Why it was altered is, as far as I know, a question without a firm answer. But how it was altered suggests some possibilities. The children have mostly been painted into something else: a calf, a goose, a sack, a heap of slaughtered animals. The apparent intent was to turn the Scriptural massacre into a mere episode of wartime plunder. The later hand didn’t see a need to paint out any soldiers on horseback, or the dismounted armed man relieving himself against a wall. A few small children in the deep field of the painting were perhaps too trivial to bother with. And the paint used was less robust than the original, and has faded at points to reveal the ghostly feet of slaughtered children. It’s still a tense, menacing image, but by the standards of the interval between its painting and its acquisition by the “Merry Monarch” Charles, it is in its way “normal.” The copies, by contrast, are sickening. There is blood. There are limp corpses. No one has ever been better on the subjects of winter or children than Bruegel, and in particular the bundled-up children of his scenes are true to life (or death). There is the bored, diffident, desultory posture of the soldiers who aren’t doing the killing themselves but are just watching. Just preventing the parents and children from getting away. Just doing nothing as they plead for their lives.

I don’t have anything useful or clever to say about the loudly asserted right of our federal government to simply murder people without charge, trial, or follow-up investigation. I don’t even want to. It’s just repellent, and infuriating, and ominous. But having immersed myself in this image and its variations over the last few weeks, I have an idea of how it is working. First, you deny the category of “innocents.” Everyone you happen to kill is a terrorist, or a prospective terrorist, or an agitator, or someone obstructing something (as if obstructing something is grounds for summary execution). You can give yourself permission to tear-gas a six month old, or maul a person going to a doctor’s appointment. Detaining toddlers bundled up against the cold. The courts will even do it for you. You substitute a new, rationalized, commonsensical image in place of the lawless use of violence.

And if it succeeds—if neither courts nor civil resistance nor the mere boring fact that we have rights as citizens that are written down and nominally binding on our rulers—it will suggest the emergence of a whole new constitution to overshadow the one we learned about in school. The dumb old words will still be there—no point in getting rid of those. They will just disappear under the overlay of unreviewable emergency powers exercised without fear of legal consequence. Hitler wouldn’t have needed the Enabling Act if he’d had a Roberts Court to explain that all the power he wanted was intrinsic to his office and he could exercise it with total impunity.

I don’t have any idea what to do about this. But I won’t accept the fraud. None of us should. If you’re reading this, you’re probably unlikely to surrender to the preemptive, blanket denial of the concept of innocents. But most of us, maybe all of us, could reach the point of the bystander, tuning it out, pretending we’re somewhere else, hoping that it will all be over soon, stretching ourselves to see blatant evil in a morally complicated light. Resisting that impulse—staying mad and staying honest—is the victory no one can take away.

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