Originally published in Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard. Edited by Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

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Ralph Raico (1936–2016) was professor emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College and a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He was a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.
A bibliography of Ralph Raico’s work, compiled by Tyler Kubik, is found here.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.
“He loved liberty as other men love power,” was the judgment passed on Benjamin Constant by a contemporary. His lifelong concern, both as a writer and politician, was the growth of human freedom.
One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so.