FASCIST JUSTICE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 70, 24 March 1926, Page 6

FASCIST JUSTICE.

Seldom has there been such a travesty of justice as that which has been provided in the trial at Chieti of the men charged with the murder of Signor Matteotti, a former Italian Socialist deputy. The Public Prosecutor, in his address to the Court, devoted himself to what was in reality a defence of those accused of the murder. He described the five prisoners as unfortunate men anxiously awaiting their fate. The main point of the actual defence was that Dumini, who admitted kidnapping Matteotti, and his four fellow prisoners were brave soldiers in the war, intrepid Fascists and good patriots. The last phrase seems somewhat redundant, since in Italy to-day Mussolini regards none as good patriots unless they are also good Fascists. The fact of the murder was not denied- Dumini accepted full responsibility for the kidnapping and said that after Matteotti had been kidnapped and murdered, by being stabbed in the stomach, he flung the corpse into the motor car and drove with it 160 miles, afterwards mutilating the corpse to prevent recognition and burying it. The body was afterwards found in a wood with the skull smashed in, and there were evidences that the murdered Socialist had put up a brave struggle with his kidnappers. Mussolini promised that the murderers would be speedily brought to justice, but nearly two years elapsed before any attempt was made to arraign them.

Violent methods have marked the Fascists throughout. It has been said that the Fascists and Bolsheviks are akin, in that Fascism is the Bolshevism of the Eight, and Bolshevism is the Fascism of the Left. Both are by violence and direct action. Th c Public Prosecutor, who was supposed to be making a case against the murderers of Matteotti, in reality appeared as an apologist for violence, and said that when Matteotti was kidnapped, such kidnappings were common and were regarded as practical jokes. Many of these kidnappings were followed" by brutal assaults and floggings, and in not a few cases the victims lost their lives. That the Fascists could have regarded these things as practical jokes shows the length to which they were prepared to go in their acts of lawless assaults. Everything haa been done in the . course of the present trial to blacken the character of the murdered deputy and to hold up the murderers to admiration as brave men serving the good of their country. And this has been done by those to whom was entrusted the task of bringing the murderers to justice. Justice has fled from Italy, as indeed it has vanished from every country all rthrough the ages when popular control, however limited, has been displaced by a dictatorship.