The Crucifixion Expert

Pieter Paul Rubens drew a crucifixion with special expertise. In the long war between his patrons, the house of Hapsburg in Flanders, and their opponents, the Dutch protestants, there was a crucifixion or a hanging at almost every crossroads in the Netherlands. Thus are memes replicated: the holy symbol becomes reality on the highway.
Here's what one website writes about the war: "(The Duke of ) Alva's errand was to punish those who had been concerned in the disorders at Antwerp and elsewhere. For this purpose he established a Council of Troubles, which was soon called by the people of the Council of Blood. Thousands of men and women, guilty and innocent, were put to death. They were hanged on scaffolds, on trees, at the door-posts of private house. Many of them were poor; but some were the chief citizens and nobles of the country. The whole business of the land was stopped; grass grew in the markets. Every family was in mourning. And against these cruelties the people could do nothing. They had had no experience in war. They were shopkeepers and schoolmasters. The Spanish soldiers had them at their mercy, and they showed no mercy." (The Baldwin Project)
Men crucified everywhere were morbid enough, but Europe had not yet witnessed the first Great Terror, in which the revolutionary government guillotined thousands of French nobles while "les tricoteuses" knitted and gossiped in the front row of the assembled crowds. The British internment and elimination of tens of thousands of the Boer warriors' families in South Africa followed. Turkish genocide of the Armenians came shortly afterwards. The unthinkable slaughter on the battlefields of World War One followed. Then in the 1930s, the Soviets introduced famine as a political weapon, and the knock on the Kulak door in the night. "This is nothing personal, you are being exterminated as a class." Finally, the appalling debauchery of the so-called "final solution", and the complete prostration of Roman Catholicism before the madness of the Bavarian Nazis (Bavaria being Roman Catholic territory). So, you can't help wondering how the Crucifixion of their founding martyr, and its memetic use over the ensuing millennia, helped the Christians develop a fierce sense of compassion for their fellow man. The only Europeans who displayed such feelings were the on-the-ground Communists who actually fought Nazism door-to-door, instead of hiding piously behind their crucifixes.