We are encouraged to be victims

Maria Farantouri went into exile when Mikis Theodorakis' music was banned after the 1967 military coup in Greece. By performing Theodorakis' songs around the world she nurtured international resistance to the military dictatorship and made the Greek public familiar with the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning poets George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis and other important Greek poets.  On the 1967 LP seen above Maria Farantouri and John Williams perform Theodorakis' music. (Farantouri is the usual transliteration of the Greek, rather than Farandouri as on the record sleeve.) 

After the military coup d’état in 1967 the new regime banned Theodorakis’s music and he was eventually arrested. But he managed to send a short message to Maria Farantouri, advising her to leave Greece. Maria Farantouri was just twenty years old when she left Greece for Paris, and she gave many concerts supporting the anti-dictatorship movement. 

Through her political engagement Maria Farantouri became a symbol of resistance and hope, and she took an active role in the women’s movement, in ecological activism and the struggle against drugs. When the Greek dictatorship fell, Mikis Theodorakis and Maria Farantouri returned to Greece. More on music in this troubled time in Greece in Songs of Freedom.

As Catherine Austin Fitt has written in the foreword to Paul Levy's book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil: Taking responsibility is [now] not something that is encouraged. We are encouraged to be victims. We are encouraged to blame "them". In doing so, we give away our power. We reject the opportunity to take responsibility, to identify our complicity in the process, and, by changing how we feel and act, to reinvent our world individually and collectively.

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