PERHAPS nothing more encapsulated the nationwide indignation at the Rome military tribunal ruling on Thursday which acquitted former SS captain Erich Priebke of involvement in multiple homicide than a cartoon in yesterday's Rome daily, La Repubblica.

It showed Hitler musing to himself in the fires of Hell. "Perhaps, I'll appeal to Italian Justice myself."

The military tribunal's ruling clearly shocked those thousands of Italians who jammed the switchboards of TV channels, radio stations and newspapers on Thursday evening as they tried to express their indignation.

The 83 year old Herr Priebke had, after all, admitted personally killing two of the 335 victims shot at the Ardeatine Caves massacre in March, 1944, a massacre which remains Italy's worst wartime atrocity.

Furthermore, Priebke was a politically committed National Socialist who had volunteered to join the Gestapo and whose responsibilities during the German occupation of Rome included the handling of relations with the Vatican. On top of that, the prosecution had produced witnesses at Priebke's trial who claimed to have been tortured by him at the Gestapo headquarters of Via Tasso in Rome.

This should have been an open and shut case. He should have been charged with involvement in "crimes against humanity". Instead, he was charged with and absolved of involvement in "multiple homicide".

His case should have been heard in a civil court. Instead it was heard in a military tribunal which, according to Mr Tullia Levi, president of Italy's Jewish community, "was not morally and politically mature enough to know that the world was watching".

Why did Italy get it so badly wrong? The answer could well be that those thousands of people who sent faxes, wrote letters and made phone calls to protest at the verdict may have underestimated the power of the "Ratline" the Odessa File that nostalgic bankering after a fascist past which a small minority of Italians still stubbornly insist was a glorious era.

While mainstream Italy expressed its outrage, while editorialists were hard at work condemning the ruling and while Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi made the honourable gesture of visiting the Ardeatine Caves on Thursday night for a memorial vigil, others were express differenting a view.

Mr Teodoro Buontempo, a deputy for the formerly fascist Alleanza Nazionale, sat in parliament on Thursday evening and told reporters. "If you want to know the truth, the people who organised the partisan attack in Via Rasella were even bigger criminals."

And there's the nub of the argument. The Ardeatine Caves massacre was a reprisal killing, ordered by Hitler after the killing of 33 German soldiers by partisan resistance fighters at Via Rasetla, central Rome, 24 hours earlier.

FOR most of the civilised world, there can be no condition of judicial parity between second World War resistance fighters and politically committed Nazis. Most of the civilised world has seen the war as a struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarian evil an evil which expressed itself most logically with the horrors and suffering of the Holocaust (75 Jews were killed at the Ardeatine Caves).

Mr Buontempo would see it otherwise. Your correspondent once spent a morning driving around the Mussolini built suburb of Ostia near Rome in his company. He assured me that since Il Duce had departed the scene, Italy had "gone downhill".

Lest anyone suspect Mr Buontempo is merely a freak, let me remind you of the words of his party leader, the "astute" Mr Gianfranco Fini, who, two years ago, pronounced Mussolini "one of the greatest statesmen of the century".

As many as 15.7 per cent of Italians voted for the Mussolini loving Mr Fini's party at this year's general election. These 15.7 per cent voted for a party which has only recently begun to renounce its fascist past and former links with Il Duce.

They voted for a party which still secretly idolises the man who introduced Nazi style anti-jewish laws in 1938, as well as condoning the deportation to concentration camps of 8,369 Jews.

(Mussolini also condoned the "addition" of 50 names to the Ardeatine Caves list).

It is possible that these voters believed they were voting for something else. That confusion comes from the lamentable failure of post war Italy to honestly confront its fascist past, to explain to its children that Mussolini was co responsible for the Holocaust, that he too was evil.

The Italian fascist past has slipped away in an era of moral relativism, greatly helped by the victorious Allied powers who were willing in 1946 to do business with former fascists, mafiosi, wife beaters and rapists anyone who claimed to be anti communist.

Ironically, yesterday was also the 16th anniversary of the Bologna train station bombing of 1980, when 85 people were killed when a bomb exploded in a crowded waiting room. Some 16 years and umpteen court hearings later, no one has been convicted for the Bologna killings, widely believed to have been the work of right wing neo-fascist terrorists.

Perhaps the Bologna victims, like those at the Ardeatine Caves, simply committed mass suicide.