In recent days, the Italian daily “il Giornale” published an article by retired judge, Carlo Nordio (a former District Attorney from Venice) on Italy’s self-defense law(s). In that article Nordio attributes the inadequacies of Italian rules of “justification” on the “fascist” philosophy (what else!) that underpinned Italy’s rules of self-defense as contained in art. 52 of the Criminal Code. Naturally, the judge makes many a good point, as one would expect from a man of his caliber. But, had the good judge gone beyond the Hegelian theories of the Fascist Regime’s legal thinking, perhaps revisiting the (evidently) similar thinking of the Italian Republic, which also places the centralized state and not the individual, at the center of contemporary Italian society, he could not have but warned us of the risks of a return to the past. In fact, the slogan coined by Benito Mussolini back in  1925 “everything within the state, nothing outside of the state, nothing against the state” reechos shades of pre-war nazifascist dictatorships and their pre and post-war communist rivals, all born of “populist” movements. The good judge was therefore shrewd in pointing his finger at the “fascists” and the undeniable link with Italy’s present-day Criminal Code, thereby making his cry for an urgent updating of Italy’s “justification” rules less subject to attack by the many partisans of “Caine” that would leave Italian “Ables” unarmed and at the mercy of their criminal “brethren” because supposedly protected by the authorities of an illuminated, “democratic” state.