This is the kind of stuff that’s right out of a vision from hell in a Poe poem, especially since it happened on an October night in a most immemorial year – for refugees and migrants trying to reach Greece.

Because while many people were sleeping in a warm bed, at least 20 refugees and migrants trying to reach Greek islands drowned in two dinghy sinkings, one off Lesvos near Turkey’s coast in northeastern Aegean waters, and the other off Kythira, 280 miles to the west off the southern Peloponnese.

The bodies off Kythira could be seen bobbing in the sea below a cliff where villagers rescued many, working with crews using ropes to lift them to safety while others waited on a small outcrop as the waters threatened to dash them too.

It was a surreal scene, but few really cared despite the drama because this is a time when there’s the remnants of COVID; when Russia is killing children in Ukraine in an invasion while sitting on the Useless Nations Insecurity Council; when legions of lemming zealots think Ex-President Psycho Trump is sane; when journalists who are the last line of defense against lies are targets, and cowardice trumps decency.

The bodies off Lesvos and Kythira should be shame enough to go around for Greece, which has been denying reports of pushing refugees and migrants back into the sea, which it denies with a convincing lack of conviction.

There’s plenty of shame to go around here in the digital age of inhumanity, and it washes all over Turkey, supposed to retain some 4.4 million people who went there fleeing war, strife, and economic hardship in their homelands, especially Syria as well as Afghanistan, where war is a permanent way of life and death.

Turkey got 3 billion euros ($2.91 million) from the Eunuch Union and the promise of visa-free travel for its citizens, and faster-track entry into the bloc which generally welcomes authoritarian leaders like President/Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan but has found him too distasteful even for its likes.

Erdogan has been trying to get another 3 billion euros that the EU promised at the same time he lets human traffickers keep sending refugees and migrants to Greece, especially its islands, going unsanctioned while Greece gets the heat for pushing them back.

They’ve been coming since 2015, initially welcomed with open arms, especially to five Greek islands in the Aegean near the coast of Turkey, which uses them as political weapons and blackmail tools, not really caring if they live or die. But neither does Greece.

Neither Greece nor Turkey would be in the equation, and there wouldn’t be a need for a swap deal, if the EU had absorbed the 5 million refugees who ran for their lives in hopes of finding a new life.

Instead, after some feigned compassion, the borders were shut to them, and countries began building walls to keep them out – including Greece which is extending a barrier on the border with Turkey to make it 120 miles long, standing as disgracefully as the Trump Wall on the Mexican border of the United States.

The onus here is on the EU, a loose conglomerate of 27 selfish member states in what is really a disunion of 447 million people and could have taken in every refugee and migrant since 2015 and added little more than 1 percent to that.

Instead, the EU dumped the problem largely on Greece, the closest point to Turkey, as well as leaving it in the hands of Italy, Malta, and Spain because under the Dublin Regulation refugees can only seek asylum in the first country in which they land, and that ain’t Germany.

It would be useful to remember these are humans we’re talking about, but to places like Hungary they aren’t because most are the M-word – (Muslims) as well as sub-Saharan Africans that many EU leaders think are sub-human.

Hundreds have drowned, mostly trying to reach Greece via the Aegean or get across the treacherous Evros River on Turkey’s border: men, women, and countless children’s last breaths bringing in water that expired their lives and hopes of having one taken away by politics.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted though, and even in the ongoing horror there were people with kindness and decency, like the villagers on Kythira – and once upon a time those on Lesvos who offered aid before compassion fatigue set in.

But perhaps the most despicable actor in all this has been Erdogan, who’s a match for Russian President Vladimir ‘Snake Eyes’ Putin in the race for the coldest person on the planet.

Erdogan, predictably, blamed Greece for pushing back refugees and migrants he lets human traffickers keep sending, many to watery graves in a world inured to suffering, the drowned forgotten.

“It has been engraved in the memories as a shame in the modern world. Western countries, especially Europe, have not learned the necessary lessons from the drama of the baby,” he said.

That was the 2015 death of a 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed back ashore in Turkey, graphically depicted in photos around the world.

If that didn’t shock Greece, Turkey, and the EU, those bodies off Lesvos and Kythira won’t, and others coming better hope for rocks to stand on.