SALON — During last summer’s anti-austerity protests in Athens, a Greek TV reporter doing a live stand-up observes the interesting fact that many of the homemade signs are in foreign languages and clearly aimed at a global audience. She stops one protester carrying a sign in German and asks him what it says. He tells her. It says, “Balls to Angela!”
That’s hardly a respectful message to direct at the eminent world leader who has juggled multiple overlapping crises throughout 2015 and was just named Time’s Person of the Year. And no doubt it contains an element of misogyny – shouldn’t European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker have been offered the same advice? But when you see what happened to Greece this year laid out in the four-part online series “#ThisIsACoup,” an urgent and riveting work of activist journalism, you can’t blame the guy.
Books will be written about the Greek crisis of 2015 and films will be made, and many of those will be more thorough, more balanced and more analytical than “#ThisIsACoup” even tries to be. But if the classic task of journalism is to write the first draft of history, director Theopi Skarlatos and producer-narrator Paul Mason have done so in electric lettering. They had remarkable access to struggling Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and other leading figures in Syriza, the left-wing coalition that took power last January on a promise to reject the regime of relentless fiscal austerity imposed by Merkel and Europe’s central bankers.
As we know now, it didn’t work. Even after Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected a new bailout from Brussels that would have entailed another round of budget cuts and tax increases, and even after the Syriza government pushed right to the brink of “Grexit,” or Greek withdrawal from the euro, the final deal was almost exactly what Europe’s bankers and bureaucrats wanted all along. Greece wound up once again sucking up to Angela Merkel and the question of whether things could have turned out differently, or how, cannot be answered in a mini-documentary that is barely an hour in all. Maybe Grexit would have been preferable to more austerity – it would certainly have been more exciting – but Merkel and Juncker obviously convinced Tsipras otherwise during the final negotiations. (The four episodes of “#ThisIsACoup,” which range from 13 to 18 minutes in length, will stream on the Field of Vision site beginning Dec. 15.)
Skarlatos and Mason follow a handful of characters through the Greek crisis, and Tsipras, the handsome Syriza figurehead who seems increasingly overwhelmed by events, is arguably the least of them. A dockworker, a theater actress, a firebrand journalist and a human-rights lawyer turned M.P. all provide their perspective on the unfolding drama, in which the upsurge of idealism and optimism provoked by the most radical government elected in Europe since at least the 1930s collapsed into gloom and resignation inside eight or nine months. Most would agree with the journalist’s summation that, in retrospect, the agenda of Merkel and the bankers was clear: They did not respect democracy and did not care about helping the Greek people; they wanted to punish noncompliance and destroy Syriza, as a warning to other would-be rebels.
