MEDALS FOR JUDGE LYNCH
Meyer, Ernest L.
Medals For Judge Lynch By ERNEST L. MEYER REPORTERS and photographers had a field day in frightfulness when Italian Partisans executed Benito Mussolini, his mistress, 17 of his staff, and when...
...She had a jagged wound from her right breast to her throat...
...Her gaping mouth told eloquently the violence of her end...
...On the contrary, the eye-witness account bubbles with a kind of dreadful necrophilic gusto, as if the author, at least by implication, were pinning medals on the splattered coat of Judge Lynch...
...Her fat double chin lay on her chest...
...And once we dip into the scum there'll be no "New World A-Coming," but only the same Old World, with new slogans, new excuses sanctifying the old and weary sins...
...He was functioning mainly in the role of a reporter of events, true, but the newspaper PM not only allows but encourages its reporters to comment on events either in the body of the report itself or in separate signed editorials...
...the only thing that distinguished them from their one-time chief was their awful stench...
...The story from which excerpts follow was written by Roi Ottley from Milan and appeared in the New York City newspaper PM: "Benito Mussolini died violently as a Fascist criminal was doomed to die...
...From the many columns of macabre eye-witness accounts, I would like to quote extracts from one report, not because I take any delight whatever in gory narrative, but because the report, I think, has serious and quite ominous implications...
...She also was propped up in a pinewood box sprinkled with sawdust...
...Her open mouth drooled dry blood...
...Decency, fairness, legality should know no boundaries...
...While Nazi spies and saboteurs went to trial one after another in an atmosphere of judicial fairness and public calm—6 Negroes were nched...
...His face was smashed, his protruding lips hung flabby and torn...
...It was thrown into sawdust in a cheap pinewood box propped up to view on a wooden horse in the crematory of the National Institute in a room reserved for cadavers...
...As a Negro he should, far more vigorously than his white brothers, denounce lynching in any country and in any shape, for the Negroes through our history have endured much from the ropes and faggot-piles of the maddened mob...
...Beside him lay half-naked Claretta Petacci, the once famous beauty and Mussolini's last mistress...
...In his excellent book, New World A-Coming, published in 1943, he laments: "Events since Pearl Harbor have stirred a sorely driven people...
...Several bullet wounds showed on his blood-caked chest...
...Yet in this entire issue of the liberal tabloid not one word of editorial attack on the mob-murderers in Milan who claimed not only the life of an undoubted criminal, the Duce, but brutally and wantonly slew and mutilated a woman not even accused of overt crimes against the people...
...His arms were broken, his throat cut, his hair matted with blood...
...One false tooth hung out...
...Medals For Judge Lynch By ERNEST L. MEYER REPORTERS and photographers had a field day in frightfulness when Italian Partisans executed Benito Mussolini, his mistress, 17 of his staff, and when mobs in Milan vented their hatred on the riddled corpses...
...No Boundaries For Decency In the past, Roi Ottley has spoken out often and bravely against lynching, race-riots, Jim-Crowism, and all the forms of hysteria and extra-legal persecution that have harassed his people through the harrowing years...
...I saw the bare, beaten corpse of the Cardboard Caesar...
...And this is what is especially depressing about the report: the author, Roi Ottley, is an American Negro...
...The faded beauty's hair was matted with blood and dirt...
...And Mussolini was lynched just as assuredly as the lowliest plantation cotton-picker tortured and slain by a "Vigilance Committee" without standing in the law of the land...
...If the brutal lynching in Missouri merits condemnation, as it assuredly does, then the Milan massacres, too, should outrage the conscience of sane men and women everywhere...
...A 6-inch gash slashed his forehead back to his bald head...
...The body of Mussolini was a terrible sight, a horrible caricature, for his people had spent their pent-up fury upon it...
...And, more outraged still, the semi-official Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano said: "The injuries and sufferings cry out for justice, but even when supremely severe and inexorable, justice cannot stoop to violence and macabre excesses...
...Even the National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy admitted the fact of the lynching when it announced: "We have determined that such acts of violence shall not be repeated...
...Once we admit a boundary, we smirch our hands with the offal of the very brutes and bandits we have now all but destroyed in Europe...
...Ottley's Silence "This was the Duce in death...
...His belly was ripped from navel to chest...
...All wore civilian clothes...
...One of these, Cleo Wright, was burned, his body mutilated and tied to an automobile, and dragged through the streets of Sikeston, Mo...
...The rest of the Fascist gang were thrown about the crematory...
...Three bullet wounds were crusted with blood...
...Nowhere in the almost 2-column long report by Roi Ottley is there a single note of comment or criticism on the bestiality of the mob which in its lust for vengeance sank as low in the scale of decency as the victims upon whom its hatred was unleashed...
...But Roi Ottley remained silent...
...Starace, the fierce Jew-baiter, completed the tragic triumvirate...
...Such acts could not be justified in the new era of freedom and strict democratic legality...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 20
