POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21314, 6 November 1934, Page 8

POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRESS. gj r "peto" complains and apologises for an anachronistic un-Christian institution which is a blur on a community which claims that love is the basis of our universe, that brotherhood is a universal law, that all problems are really caused by the endeavour to evade its sanctions. Brotherhood excludes nothing from its periphery but includes all from the lowest creature in the scale of evolution to the most sublime being, and none of us will be complete until all other units have achieved their fullest and most complete development. This is why I am against capital punishment. Who is contradicting himself—"Peto" or I? I wish an answer to this. "Peto" says that nations that have abandoned capital punishment have readopted it. This is not true of any nation, not even Italy, where capital punishment has been abolished for more than 50 years. Italy has refused to resurrect capital punishment for murderers, but Fascism has only readopted it, not against murderers, but against political opponents as such. I shall explain that nine persons have already been legally executed in Italy not because they committed any crime, but because they were found in incriminating circumstances and also confessed that they intended to murder Mussolini. This is the case with Russia, Germany, and Japan! Totalitarianism cannot exist without murders! Again, "Peto" says that if hanging is not a total success in abolishing criminality, still it is a partial one! How long does he need to prove the efficiency of hanging, when it has been in use for scores of centuries? Why was it abolished for other acts of lawlessness? The taking of human life is wrong whether done by an individual or by a state, and it is un-Christian to say that it can cure problems. "Peto" says that it will cure problems by degrees and with time, so that individuals would be justified in resorting to self-murder in order to solve their own problems. I do not attribute these arguments to "Peto," but these undoubtedly are sequences to his own reasoning. Will "Peto" refuse to admit that

heretics ceased to exist as soon as the churches ceased to burn them? The churches were destroying their own creation. Let us deal with the problems which create criminality and criminals will henceforth cease to exist. Will "Pcto" answer this question? Docs hanging destroy the criminal or only his body? Also let him forget Ins thin-skirmess for I am not to be blamed if some of the caps for arguments) happen to fit his head. lam not dealing with his elusive personality bin with his arguments or lack cf them.—Yours, etc., UMBERTO COLONNA. | INovember 5, 1934.