Arrogance and punishment
Who could have imagined that the invasion of cameras into every aspect of private and public life would have such beneficial results? There we were, worrying that faceless, hidden state security agents would be watching our every move, like Big Brother in George Orwell’s legendary «1984.» Now we are witnessing exactly the opposite: Big Brother’s little agents are being uncovered and paraded before the world’s contemptuous gaze because of their ill treatment of prisoners. We saw this at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad; we saw it at the Omonia police station in Athens, where officers filmed themselves mistreating two prisoners. What these two very different incidents have in common is the pornographic lust felt by the protagonists in their desire to film their pranks. They never thought these otherwise carefree moments of torture would gain international notoriety and become explosive political issues. Everything is tangled up in the World Wide Web, as if the Internet is our new cosmological system. In ancient times, the 12 gods of Olympus and their camp followers would observe the goings-on of mortals and join the fray whenever the mood took them. Later, the One God watched over everything His creatures got up to and He waited for the day when He would punish or reward them accordingly. Today, in a world with no gods, we mortals watch each other and affect each other through technological intervention. Nemesis for the police officers at the Omonia precinct came through their own arrogance: their brutal treatment of their prisoners and their sick desire to record this behavior as a video on a cell phone as if it were some heroic act that they needed to share with colleagues, relatives and friends. And so, all of us got to share the fun. That’s why we should be grateful for the technology that has put a digital camera in almost every pocket. It appears that this has been of greater help in keeping security services in check rather than facilitating control within the country. From the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, which led to rioting and the death of 55 people, we have seen cameras uncover brutality which, as revealed by later investigations, was routine but unreported. The most interesting instances are when divine justice comes into play via the trap sprung by the perpetrator himself. Plutarch has a good tale on this theme. It goes roughly like this: Ibycus, one of the nine great lyric poets of Greek antiquity who lived in the 6th century BC, was walking to Corinth when he was attacked by robbers. With his dying breath, the poet pointed to a flock of cranes flying overhead and cried, «These cranes will avenge my death!» Laughing, the robbers finished him off. Later, as the robbers joined other spectators in Corinth’s theater, they saw the cranes passing overhead. «There go Ibycus’ cranes,» one of them scoffed. Someone in the crowd heard this and, as people knew that Ibycus had been murdered, the robbers were forced to confess to their crime and were duly punished, paying for their arrogance with their lives. It is certain, though, that such instances of self-entrapment are just the tip of the iceberg of the brutality displayed by police officers, coast guard officials, border guards, prison wardens and other officers of the state security mechanisms. The general and official tolerance of the conditions under which people are kept at police holding cells, in transfer facilities, in prisons is not only a disgrace but an ongoing crime. Greece has been a member of the European Union since 1981 and never fails to boast that the ancient Greeks laid the foundations of Western civilization, and yet, no progress has been made in improving the treatment of prisoners. Greece is in danger of suffering the international contempt that Turkey suffered when the film «Midnight Express» was released. Therefore, so that we need not rely solely on Ibycus’ cranes or police officers’ mobile phones, we should take down the surveillance cameras that have been installed on street corners and in public squares and set them up in every police station, coast guard station and prison – until such time that we feel that criminals, rather than officers of the law, are the greatest danger to our society and our civilization.
