CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Hellas within Me is a Very Beautiful Young Woman: The Music of Mikis Theodorakis

Mikis Theodorakis in the Netherlands, 1972. Wikipedia Commons.

Mikis Theodorakis was an internationally recognized Greek symbol of resistance to capitalism and foreign influence in Greece. When I left Greece for the United States in 1961, he was 36 years old. He was supporting communism, which the United States considered enemy of enemies. Indeed, the Cold War, 1945-1989, mirrored the irrational hatred plutocrats had for the Soviet Union that, officially, had adopted communism as state ideology and policy. This international weaponization of class conflict became history with the return of the Soviet Union without its empire back to Russia in 1989-1990.

Communism brought civil war to Greece. It started in 1943 and ended with the defeat of the communist resistance forces in 1949. The British and Germans sparked this vicious struggle of the Greeks killing Greeks.

Illiterate communists in the village I was born, Valsamata, in the Ionian island of Cephalonia, assassinated two brothers of my father and they almost killed my father as well. Why? I really don’t know. My father and his brothers owned a few small pieces of land from which they raised wine, olive oil, wheat, barley, hay and lentils. We also had small flocks of goats and sheep as well as a few chickens, a donkey, a mule, a dog and more than one cat. Did the killers of my uncles think their murders helped communism? I cannot answer this question, though civil wars like the Peloponnesian War, 431-404 BCE, are irrational slaughterhouses. They automatically divide people ready to commit atrocities. Reason, national identity, family relationships, speaking the same language, worshipping the same gods / god and having the same history take a vacation.

In the 20th century, the Germans and the British did not want the Greeks to realize they were the descendants of fabulous ancient Greeks and institutions like democracy, science, gorgeous architecture, art and advanced technology. Or that their ancestors were the Minoans, Myceneans, Achilles, Odysseus, Telemachos, Homer, Helen, Agamemnon, Palamedes, Orpheus, Daidalos, Lykourgos, Solon, Kleisthenes, Sapho, Korinna, Hypatia, Herakleitos, Pythagoras, the military genius of Miltiades (490 BCE) and Themistokles (480 BCE); Pericles, the building of the Parthenon, the fabulous tragic poets of the fifth century BCE (Aeschylos, Sophocles and Euripides), the inimitable Aristophanes, poet of satire and comedy, great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, Alexander the Great, the mathematicians Euclid and Archimedes, the great astronomer Hipparchos and the Antikythera Mechanism, the astronomical computer of genius of the second century BCE. These inventors of civilization — and countless other achievements of the Greeks — triggered the hatred of the British and Germans against modern Greeks. They still don’t like them. The Germans nearly annihilated Greece. They also looted the country’s archaeological treasures, which they have yet to return. The British, meanwhile, bribed one of the two small resistance groups fighting the Germans. British agents convinced those fighters that the British government would fund and arm them provided they turned their guns against the other resistance group because, the British said, that group was communist, fighting the Germans for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Thus a lie launched the civil war that engulfed the starving Greeks, adding blood to more blood.

Music: a universe of beauty and freedom resurrecting Dionysos

Dionysos by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1595. Public domain.

I had heard of Mikis Theodorakis, especially about his fabulous music.

In 1964, I saw the outstanding movie, Zorba the Greek, and I enjoyed immensely its music, a gift of Theodorakis. Years later, my interest in Theodorakis increased dramatically. Here’s why.

Of all Greek history, the existential trial of Hellenism in the 20th century struck me to the core. History taught me that the gods........

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