Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to “trivialize” the destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened, couldn’t some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must have publicly-financed museums commemorating the foreign victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of course, but maybe in a low-rent area of Washington?

This is from Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal, by historian Ralph Raico, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010, pp. 162-163. I read through almost the whole thing this morning. This is Raico at his best, although, I admit, I’ve never read anything by him that wasn’t good. The book is available to all here. The book’s title reminds me of the famous quote from Lord Acton: “Great men are almost always bad men.” Raico’s analysis of Winston Churchill is eye-popping.

UPDATE: Ralph Raico replies below to some of the commenters.