Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informative reading.

During the festive season we try to escape the everyday, the ordinary, the stressful and the meaningless. We rejoice, forgetting the crises, especially the economic one, which we think will destroy us. We listen to festive music, try to enjoy the best food, meet beloved people and live a few days or at least a few hours of temporary but necessary happiness, together with the children, the grandchildren for the older ones, friends, relatives and those who give us pleasure.

We exchange gifts of small value and great symbolism for the love, esteem and other feelings that connect us with the recipients of our offerings.

Without realizing it, the feasts of Christmas, the New Year and Epiphany gradually take hold of us, changing our mood, removing gloom, giving consolation and joy to adults and even more to the younger ones and children.

In these moments, hours and days when we celebrate, we rarely turn our thoughts to those who suffer: the sick, the bereaved, the deprived, the lonely and the imprisoned.

Especially for prisoners, we do not care. We do not think of them, we are indifferent and, worst of all, many mock them and with malicious pleasure accept their torment because they did wrong and “served them right” for being locked in prison.

Thus the publications of the privileged classes, of publishers and major journalists, with incomes that the average Greek will not approach even in his dreams, ridicule and drag through the mud well-known remand prisoners, making malicious comments because the wealth they managed to acquire, by unknown methods and ways, allows them to be unchecked. After all, the institutions of Democracy and the Rule of Law do not apply to the powerful and privileged. They are applied to the weak, the socially disadvantaged and those who have lost their power and privileges.

Under the pretext that the economic crisis is due to the remand prisoners and not to other causes, because the “people” are never at fault, ironic comments, abuse and supposed satire fill whole pages in the newspapers of the rich. In one of them, the front page shows caricatures of remand defendants in striped prison uniforms, singing carols. There one recognizes a former minister, a fashion designer, a major banker, a football official and a businessman holding triangles for the carols, together with the tragic figure of the only woman being humiliated, a mother and wife of the former minister, with a fox fur over her shoulders along with the prison uniform. And who publicly shames the remand prisoners and the woman? A very well-known major journalist and publisher, son of a prominent political figure, who managed to prevail by becoming rich and provocative. He owns an ultra-luxurious palace in the northern suburbs and even a radio station. That is why he can be insensitive. He mocks the formerly powerful whom he once flattered, and ridicules their misery as, thrown into prison without power, already publicly disgraced, they are slowly and torturously being destroyed not only morally but also physically.

The holy days of Christmas do not move the powerful of the day and those surrounded by many honors. They make them worse. Hardened and insensitive, they publicly shame those who have fallen. Without compassion. Without feeling. Without shame, without what we once called aidos.

Shameless, hardened and arrogant, they strike those already fallen, who from powerful became helpless. They mock the helpless. They drag them through the mud most of all, because they serve as scapegoats for the necessary “disorientation” of public opinion, of people who are becoming poorer from already poor, deprived even of the basics.

Within the prison walls, the well-known defendants, along with the social outcry stirred up by the entangled interests and their “media,” along with deprivation of liberty, the seizure of all their property, their subjection to harsh investigative procedures that know no limits of severity, without secrecy, with medieval public shaming of those targeted for prosecution, along with the pain of separation from their children and loved ones, also endure the dreadful humiliation through the press. These papers, at every opportunity and on the slightest pretext, promote the new conquest of a deputy who is the offspring of a professional politician, the brilliant studies abroad of the mayor who is the grandson of the Methuselah former prime minister, and the brilliant reception of the businessman with the fifty-million-euro yacht, or the charitable activity and alms of the very rich.

Few think that the well-known prisoners targeted by mockery lost their freedom without being tried. Without the lawful procedures of civilized states. They were locked in prison and their number is growing because their prosecution is necessary to serve other purposes and not to satisfy the sense of Justice. And together with the formerly powerful, relatives or unsuspecting spouses are imprisoned after their targeted humiliation through the tabloids and channels of entanglement.

In vain does the voice of Christ, whose Birth we celebrate, identify and warn those who, when he was “in prison” [Matt. 25:36], did not visit him, but, as the Gospel word would add with reference to our era, publicly shamed him, mocking prisoners with malice and arrogance, jeering at and making sport of their misery. According to the Gospel, these people will go to the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” to eternal hell, as accursed, together with their acts and performances. To the hell which, unfortunately for them, exists not only in the next life but also in the present one.

Emmanouil Papadakis