Department of Biology, Room 56-423 Tel. 617/253-4707

May 29, 1973

To the Editor

The New York Times

229 West 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036

Dear Sir:

I was a teenager in Italy when Mussolini clamped his dictatorship on
the Italian people. My eyewitness observations, plus later study,
make me find some frightening similarities between the events of
1926, when the Italian democracy was formally destroyed, and the
current American scene.

There as now here, scandals were rocking a conservative Government.
Mussolini's close personal associates were involved in the murder of
opposition politicians and in all sort of illegal acts. There as now
here, the ruler was appealing to the overriding interest of national
security against subversion.

Discontented veterans were heing exploited, as our prisoners of war
now are, to raise the flag of patriotism. They were used to threaten
spontaneous" physical violence against democrats and anti-fascists --
a role for which the President appears to be coaching our returned
prisoners of war.

A Parliament of "castrati" made feeble noises of protest but could
muster no leadership for resistance. The Italian Parliament, like
our Congress now, was ready to collapse before any show of force.

The revelations of Watergate are less ominous than the recent speeches
by President Nixon and his brutal uncovering of the network of secrecy
and espionage he has been fashioning for the American people. It is
only because he failed in his attempt to muzzle the press and the media
that his attack on our democracy has been at least temporarily
frustrated. But the dangers still exist.

After half a century, Mussolini may now he seen by historians as a
comic-opera tyrant; but forty million people suffered and millions of
Italians, Greeks, Fthiopians, and Americans died because of him.
Richard Nixon may also, in reality, he less dangerous than he now
appears, provided we do not lean hack passively, in fright or
indifference, and let him destroy our democracy in the name of
"national security."

S. E. Luria