Great Wars and Great Leaders

The backdrop of this blistering and deeply insightful scholarly history is the whitewashing of "great leaders" like Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, FDR, Truman, Stalin, Trotsky, and other collectivists. They are highly regarded because they were on the "right side" of the rise of the state.
But do they deserve adulation? Ralph Raico, the great historian of classical liberalism, says no: these great leaders were the main agents in the decline of civilization in the 20th century, all of them antiliberals who used their power to celebrate and enhance state power.

Robert Higgs (author of Crisis & Leviathan) writes the foreword and cheers this powerful exposé as a necessary corrective: "Raico's historical essays are not for the faint of heart or for those whose loyalty to the US or British state outweighs their devotion to truth and humanity. Yet Ralph did not invent the ugly facts he recounts here, as his ample documentation attests. Indeed, many historians have known these facts, but few have been willing to step forward and defy politically popular and professionally fashionable views in the forthright, pull-no-punches way that Raico does."
"Thus," writes Higgs, "in these pages, you will find descriptions and accounts of World War I, of the lead-up to formal US belligerence in World War II, and of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman, among others, that bear little resemblance to what you were taught in school. Here you will encounter, perhaps for the first time, compelling evidence of how the British maneuvered US leaders and tricked the American people prior to the US declarations of war in 1917 and 1941. You will read about how the British undertook to starve the Germans — men, women, and children alike — not only during World War I, but for the greater part of a year after the armistice. You will be presented with descriptions of how the communists were deified and the German people demonized by historians and others who ought to have known better. You will see painted in truer shades a portrait of the epic confrontation between the great majority of Americans who wished to keep their country at peace in 1939, 1940, and 1941 and the well-placed, unscrupulous minority who sought to plunge the United States into the European maelstrom."