FISA abuses, denial of Habeas Corpus, illegal torture, untrammeled executive power, you name it,   each new constitutional abuse constitutes one more element in a frightening trend.  

If you doubt it, you should, by all means, take a look at an excellent PBS P.O.V. Documentary, The Judge and the General, that aired last night on KETC.  The film, by the Newshour’s Elizabeth Farnsworth and Chilean Patricio Lanfranco, will air again on KETC on Sunday August 31 at 10:30 pm.  If you have digital access, you can catch it on KETCHD on Friday, Aug. 22 at 11:00 am, or on Sunday August 24 at  12:00 pm. (UPDATE:  Listings for other local stations can be found on the P.O.V. site where the film will also be streamed in its entirety until Sept. 2.)

The documentary deals with what Chileans now refer to as:

… the other 9/11″ – the September 11, 1973, coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, against the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende. The coup left thousands of Chileans dead, tortured or “disappeared.” Allende died, apparently by suicide. The ensuing 17-year-long dictatorship was embraced then, and even now, by a large segment of Chilean society …

The story follows the intellectual odyssey of the conservative judge who built the case against Pinochet after he left power. In the film, Judge Guzman, a typical “good German,” undergoes a transformation when he is brought face-to-face with the evil that ran rampant while he and thousands of other Chileans looked the other way and a thriving democracy was transformed into a hell on earth for those who had supported Allende or who spoke out against the excesses of Pinochet.

The filmmakers are sober journalists, not screaming radicals, but they are very aware of the parallels to what has been happening in the U.S. over the past eight years. According to Farnsworth:

We screened the film in San Francisco, and many people said after they watched The Judge and the General, that the film evokes concerns about America and what’s happening today. In making the film, Patricio and I certainly didn’t make any relationship between what’s going on in America today and what was going on in Chile explicit, but I do think these are universal experiences. Around the world, governments do things their people wish they wouldn’t do. This is not just a Chilean story, it’s a universal story.

If you manage to catch this excellent documentary, it might also be a good idea to keep in mind points Naomi Klein raises in The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In her analysis of Pinochet’s effort to cleanse the body politic of leftist influence, the role played by not only the U.S. government, but by economists and ideologues from the University of Chicago–the so-called Chicago boys–is unequivocal.  We shouldn’t forget that we have our own facist intellectual infrastructure well in place.