Violent Saviors, page 30
Diệm’s brother, Nhu, justified the program’s compulsion as necessary by citing Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth on the need to put an end to traditional society as a precondition for takeoff. A US government official in 1962 saw Nhu’s strategic hamlets as analogous to China’s brutal Great Leap Forward. Nevertheless, the official said, the US should support them because of the “Rostowian premise that an agricultural revolution must precede any industrial revolution.” Rostow himself in 1962 envisioned the guerrilla war turning in the US’s favor “if the hamlet program, and all it stands for, takes hold.”28
In March 1962, the American and Vietnamese militaries began a program called “Operation Sunrise” in an area to the north of Saigon with heavy Viet Cong activity. Six hundred government soldiers moved peasants into a strategic hamlet called Ben Tuong. The army told potential settlers they would get a school, schoolbooks, a clinic, medical supplies, a market, water wells, and a defense force to protect them. Seventy families volunteered for resettlement, but another 135 families needed extra persuasion at gunpoint. The army burned their old houses. In Ben Tuong, the government gave the seventy volunteer families land to build their own houses. The government gave the 135 nonvolunteer families a barracks on the edge of the village. There was a concrete administration building and a clinic, but the peasants had to construct themselves the rest of what the government promised them.
The promise of a local market did not work out. The hamlet was so far from the nearest market town that the peasants would have to pay an unaffordable $2.85 per person for a one-way motor pedicab ride to reach the market. The US government gave each family $21 as compensation for lost property, but the government subtracted the cost of the new houses from this amount, leaving them with about enough for two pedicab rides—$5.57 each.
The settlers in Ben Tuong consisted primarily of the very young and very old. The prime-age adults went into hiding to escape the blessings of American development. Even using force, the army had only managed to move 7 percent of the local district population into Ben Tuong.29
A young woman in the strategic hamlet told a visiting New York Times reporter that the troops burned the villagers’ two tons worth of rice stores. A banner in Ben Tuong told the settlers whose villages the government troops had just destroyed that “we will root out all the Viet Cong who destroy our villages.”30
Two Rand Corporation consultants visited strategic hamlets from January to April 1962. They noted the hamlets forced villagers into communal labor, which had amounted to forty-five to ninety days of labor in three months, with a five-day break for the New Year holiday. The Rand consultants saw the coercive program as losing instead of winning hearts and minds. Forced labor had been a much-hated feature of the French colonial regime in Vietnam.31
The South Vietnamese army controlled who could enter and leave the model village, which they surrounded with a barbed wire fence. Some observers likened the strategic hamlet to a detention center. The army forced the prisoners to pay for their own barbed wire.32
Yet the supporters of strategic hamlets saw a rosier picture. The US Information Service gave the settlers a free weekly paper called Toward the Good Life. The paper explained to the settlers that Operation Sunrise had moved them to Ben Tuong both to defeat the Viet Cong and to raise rural living standards. The paper acknowledged that “in some cases, they are being required to move.”33
US Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara visited a strategic hamlet during his lightning trip to Vietnam on May 11, 1962. He saw “nothing but progress and hope for the future.”34
A South Vietnamese government report on the strategic hamlet program in 1963 offered even more hope for the future. The report announced the US will fund the following goods for families in the strategic hamlets: (1) fertilizer, increasing rice yields by 250 percent, (2) hundreds of new schoolrooms, (3) insect and rodent control, increasing rice yields even more, (4) new crop varieties, quadrupling sweet potato yields, (5) motorized boats, quintupling catches by fishermen, (6) rural dispensaries for thousands of hamlets, and (7) better pigs, raising incomes of hundreds of thousands of families.35
On February 4, 1963, the US Army chief of staff, General Earle G. Wheeler, deployed the venerable gerund defense in defense of the strategic hamlets after leading a survey mission to review them. The tide was “turning in our favor,” Wheeler said. The military measures “are providing increasing opportunities for political and economic growth. And the Government is starting to take advantage of these opportunities. The Government is beginning to reach the people.” More gerunds followed: “The Agency for International Development is assisting these officials in achieving their expectations for a better life,” and “the Government of Vietnam is showing [the peasant] both promise and progress, and he is responding encouragingly.”36
The gerunds did not succeed very long in hiding the unpopularity of the hamlets. As early as October 16, 1962, Rostow’s own deputy was informing him that in Central Vietnam, the strategic hamlets were “mostly pure façade.” The villagers saw no benefit for themselves in the program, and it failed to reduce Viet Cong attacks. A US government report noted that by August 1963, it was already clear that the strategic hamlet program had “largely ceased to progress.” Strategic hamlets produced only successful counterattacks by the Viet Cong. Despite all the supposed success of Operation Sunrise, the Viet Cong captured the model village of Ben Tuong on August 20, 1963.37
The dawning realization of these failures caused US support for Diệm to weaken further. The coup Rostow had explored back in 1961 finally happened. Disgruntled military officers overthrew and murdered Diệm and his brother Nhu on November 1–2, 1963, with US support. The new government halted the construction of strategic hamlets.38
To be fair, strategic hamlets were probably the worst example of US development efforts in Vietnam. But like other extremes in this history of development violence, they illustrate the most coercive side of development that liberals wanted to eliminate on moral grounds. Even then, Rostow’s variety of violence-for-your-own-good was certainly not as extreme as that of previous generations of thinkers. But he pursued development to achieve military victory, and he justified the pursuit of military victory as necessary for development. In the end, he achieved neither development nor victory.
How did Rostow evaluate his own role in the age of development? In 1984, the World Bank held a conference celebrating the Pioneers in Development, the first generation of development economists. The World Bank included Rostow as one of the Pioneers.
Rostow in 1984 made clear he “has no regrets.” He said his ideas “hold up reasonably well in retrospect.” He did acknowledge that “disruptive external expressions of nationalism proved harder to avoid than we would have hoped, notably in South Asia and Africa.” He did not mention Vietnam.39
Although the US attempt to develop Vietnam ended after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Rostow’s development ideas had a more lasting effect. His embrace of forced investment, his surprisingly positive view of forced development under Stalin and Mao, and his lack of interest in market solutions helped fuel an illiberal consensus in aid and development establishment. It was time for a new generation of liberals to challenge this consensus.
18
Liberal Economists Strike Back
Milton and Rose Friedman were the leading skeptics of foreign aid and development planning during Rostow’s generation, reinforced by their intellectual ally P. T. Bauer. They perceived that thinkers like Rostow had shown far too much sympathy for even the most violent proponents of planning—Lenin and Stalin. Like Smith, the Friedmans and Bauer wanted voluntary commerce to replace mandatory development. Rejecting the emphasis of Rostow and other development economists on material income alone, these liberal economists wanted freedom to be an end in itself. This was the alternative vision they offered as the ideological battle with communism reached its climax.
The Friedmans and Bauer led the emergence of the modern promarket aid skeptics. They continued the free-market tradition promoted previously by Ludwig von Mises. They continued and advanced the long-standing liberal campaign against forced labor. They fought back against the triumph of illiberal views seen in the previous two chapters. Their legacy on self-determination would be ambiguous, partly explained by the perpetual liberal struggle to reconcile collective and individual self-determination. As often with liberal skeptics, they would sometimes have trouble listening to their own skepticism.
In 1938, Milton Friedman and Rose Director got married. Milton later declared that Rose was an equal partner in his public policy work. The only time she had explicit coauthorship was for their classic book Free to Choose. Following Milton’s declaration, this chapter will cite both Milton and Rose for quotes from Capitalism and Freedom (where the author is given as Milton with the assistance of Rose), as well as Free to Choose.
Like many other key liberals in the post–World War II debate on freedom—such as Mises, Berlin, and P. T. Bauer—the Friedmans were members of a group previously targeted by anti-liberal Western thinking on immigration restrictions. They were all of Eastern European Jewish heritage. Milton was born on July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents had immigrated in the 1890s from Carpatho-Ruthenia, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire but later became part of the Soviet Union. Rose Director was born in Charterisk in what is now Ukraine in December 1911, brought to the US by her family just before the outbreak of World War I. Many of the relatives she left behind later died in the Holocaust.1
The families of Milton and Rose were thus part of the flood of Eastern European Jews coming to the US before World War I, who would after that war become the target of immigration restrictions. Milton wrote to Rose in March 1938 about his desperation to pressure the US government to admit refugees from the Nazis. He concluded it was hopeless: “I suppose we can’t do much but go our own individual futile ways.” The anti–Eastern European national quotas on US immigration would be repealed in the 1960s. Although they had little engagement with that policy change, the shift against prejudice may have made it easier for their views to gain acceptance more broadly.2
Milton and Rose were visitors at Cambridge University from 1953 to 1954, where they met P. T. Bauer. Rose noted him as among those at Cambridge who believed that “individual freedom is the prime objective of social arrangements.” Milton celebrated him as the world’s leading expert on foreign aid. The Friedmans were going to interact with Bauer a lot on development in the next four decades.3
In 1971, P. T. Bauer published his magnum opus, Dissent on Development, which denounced both paternalism and coercion in development policy. To begin with, the term “Third World” was “a particularly infelicitous expression.” It lumped together diverse individuals in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as if they were just a blob of “malleable clay” to be shaped by aid experts. To Bauer, the aid mainstream implied “western superiority,” because its views were “that without aid the underdeveloped countries could not work out their salvation, that they must follow our ways and that they cannot progress without us.” Bauer disagreed “that individual Africans and Asians are invariably unenterprising,” or that “individual Africans and Asians cannot or do not take a long-term view.” Against this picture, he noted the success of smallholder rubber producers in Sumatra and Borneo beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. Likewise, Bauer noted the success of local producers with kola nuts in western Nigeria, coffee and cotton in East Africa, and cocoa, groundnuts, and oil palm products in West Africa. Many of these products require producers to wait for years for initial plantings to produce a crop.4
The intended beneficiaries of this aid were likely to resent the aid donors’ “patronizing attitude,” canceling out the supposed ability of Western donors to gain Third World allies against the Soviets. The aid donors increased resentment even more by trying to make the recipients “follow our ways,” even “against the will of the supposed beneficiaries.” Bauer rejected this on both normative and positive grounds. Morally, “the right to force people to change their values, attitudes and conduct simply in the interests of higher incomes is disputable.” As Bauer had laconically phrased it earlier in his career: “The right of some people to force others to develop is not self-evident.”5
Bauer’s central critique of top-down development planning was that “it suggests that persons neither have nor should have any choice, control or responsibility in matters which affect their position and prospects.” The view of a Third World peoples as “a standardized mass” was made even worse by then, making them “subject to rulers with unlimited power” whom development advisors would guide.
The development mainstream therefore “first dehumanizes people and then envisages an inhuman destiny for them.” The debate over development planning was not just a debate about facts, about whether planning worked, but about how much one valued individual freedom. Bauer in another article emphasized that “the choice between policies must also depend on value judgments.”6
But Bauer hindered his own appeal to people in Asia and Africa with his favorable view of colonial rule. He saw such rule as involving “relatively little coercion, or even interference in the lives of the great majority of the people,” while establishing law and order and secure property rights. Bauer did not emphasize a demand for self-determination, although he noted colonial status was humiliating to many subjects. Bauer was susceptible to a temptation that afflicted other liberals in this history, of looking for a colonial shortcut that could drop free institutions onto another society.7
Although the Friedmans were influenced by Bauer, they had their own direct exposure to development efforts. Milton’s first exposure to development policies came in India in 1955. The Indian government asked the Eisenhower administration for an economist to give advice on the Indian development plan. Eisenhower was eager to counter the development advisors in India who advocated Soviet-style five-year plans, so he dispatched the promarket Friedman to visit India.
The Indian government politely ignored Friedman’s promarket advice, which he outlined in a memo never to be seen again. Yet Friedman would not give up so easily. A year later, he wrote how freedom in India would allow “the enormous pent-up energies of millions of intelligent and vigorous people” to be released for development. However, current development policy in India favored a centralized plan to be enforced by government control. Friedman saw the plan as “a threat to political and civil freedom.”8
In 1958, Friedman published for the first time his overall critique of foreign aid and the mainstream aid thinkers. Again, he differed with them when he saw freedom as an end in itself. He denounced the “totalitarian” influences on development thinking. He wanted “free men” to “peaceably use their capacities, abilities, and resources.” Free people should be allowed to pursue their own “aspirations,” not conform to someone else’s aspirations for them.
The mainstream development economists failed to notice how much planning required “the use of central force and authority to enforce conformity” with the plan. Friedman quoted a report on aid by the Center for International Studies at MIT, where Rostow was a member. The report said aid should go to countries where “national effort is being mobilized for development.” The measure of this effort was how much governments were able to “capture a good fraction of increases in income for the purpose of further investment.” In the Rostow view, governments should “capture” private income to meet investment targets.9
Friedman noted sardonically that the US failed to satisfy this capture requirement. The government who best satisfied the capture criterion would be the Soviet Union. The Soviets suppressed consumption of Soviet citizens to plow resources into the five-year plan. The Soviet plan combined forced saving, forced labor, and forced industrialization, as it had under Lenin. Friedman was continuing the venerable liberal critique of forced labor. Friedman in 1958 lamented that foreign aid wound up supporting the Communists’ approach.10
For the rest of his career, Milton in collaboration with Rose would develop further this critique of compulsion. He applied the critique both to developing nations and to the United States.
Seeing the Friedmans only as advocates of laissez-faire misses their moral principles. They first advocated liberty. Then they arrived at policies that they saw as consistent with that liberty. Those who disagreed with these policies could have at least acknowledged—but almost never did acknowledge—the Friedmans’ normative ideal of freedom.
In their advocacy for freedom, Milton and Rose reprised most of the key arguments of liberal thinkers going back to Adam Smith. Like Adam Smith, the Friedmans saw development as a spontaneous order. They were deeply doubtful about the Western experts who claimed they could plan development, when in fact “no one can predict in advance what will turn out to be the most effective use of a nation’s productive resources.” An economy developed like a language. There was no linguistic planner to force particular words on native speakers. An economy developed also like musical culture. Rose and Milton noted that no central planner forced the citizens of Calcutta to like the same music as the citizens of Vienna.11
Moreover, Milton and Rose suspected the self-interest of the Western agents of progress in the Rest. Rose got snarky during their trip to India: “We may not be helping the Indians but we’re certainly creating plenty of plushy job opportunities for lower quality American so-called economists. I didn’t know there were so many.” She thought the Ford Foundation didn’t accomplish much besides enabling “the American employees to live at a very high level” with a half dozen servants. The new class of policy experts in universities and think tanks at home was also just another special interest group, one that had been successful in getting high salaries for its own members. Rose and Milton here made an ad hominem attack on their intellectual opponents. But they also shared the classic doubts as to whether the experts themselves were really free from self-interest.12
