> >Brad de Long wrote,
> > > Walt Whitman Rostow is a very good development economist and economic
> > > historian. But I wouldn't call his tenure as Assistant to the
> > > President for National Security a big win...
>
> Tom Walker wrote:
> >I wouldn't call Rostow's once canonical _The Stages of Economic Growth_ a
> >big win as development economics or economic history, either. There is
> >more of a connection between Rostow's facile take-off theory and the
> >Westmoreland body-count logic of Viet-Nam War escalation than might appear
> >at first sight.
>
> I've been told -- by a well-informed political scientist -- that WW Rostow
> believed that Vietnam was "about to make the take-off" during the 1960s.
> This "insight" helped shape US military strategy.
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il
Here it is from Rostow himself in speech to 1961 "graduating class" [my
quotations marks] in special warfare at Fort Bragg, NC ("Guerrilla
Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas," in _The Vietnam Reader_, eds. Marcus
Raskin & Bernard Fall, Vintage Books 1967, pp. 108-116):
"...one must begin with the great revolutionary process [read:
modernization] that is going forward in the southern half of the
world...You are not merely soldiers in the old sense...not merely
the proper military program of deterrence but programs of village
development, communications, and indoctrination...I salute you as
I would a group of doctors, teachers, economic planners,
agricultural experts, civil servants, or those others who are now
leading the way in the southern half of the globe in fashioning
new nations and societies that will stand up straight and assume in
time their rightful place of dignity and responsibility in the
world community; for this is our common mission."
WR was "fashion designer" of US repression in Vietnam. His policy-
making is logical extension of theory (based upon capitalist West
experience) that development passes through series of stages because
he says Communists (who he calls "scavengers of the modernization
process") will try to take advantage by preying on weak governments
vulnerable to "conspiratorial" and "disciplined" cadre organization
characterizing guerrilla warfare.
Michael Hoover (not necessarily well-informed poli sci guy)
