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excessive use of state terror such as some of us may detect in the recent
tragic events in the Middle East. But questions are raised when you look
at targets. The World Trade Center might be said to represent that
industrial complex, now defined perhaps as multinational corporations .
And you also might say that the Pentagon most clearly represents the
military. Is it not possible that somewhere there are individuals who still
perceive a major threat in the consequences of what Eisenhower identi–
fied as the military-industrial complex? I don't want to justify that . ..
Norman Podhoretz:
Well, you
are
justifying it.
Art Meyer:
Okay, perhaps I am. But I am not justifying ...
Norman Podhoretz:
You are in a very insidious way. I think what you
said is utterly outrageous and is a justification.
If
you want to justify it,
justify it and make your argument. Don't say you don't justify it and
then sneak the justification in the back door.
Art Meyer:
I don't justify the terrorist attack.
It
was an attack on indi–
viduals whose lives deserved to go on.
Norman Podhoretz:
You just said it was an attack on the military-indus–
trial complex. But there happened to be individuals in those places who
got killed. So the military-industrial complex is not an abstraction in
which no people are involved.
Art Meyer:
I am on ly asking whether there is some possibility that in the
symbolic values of their targets, which were perhaps erroneously chosen
by them, tragically chosen, there is some kind of link to the military–
indu strial warning by Eisenhower.
Norman Podhoretz:
What Eisenhower said about the military-industrial
complex is one thing. I would say that thanks to what he called the
military-industrial complex, communism, perhaps the worst form of
totalitarianism the world has ever known, which had, according to
Solzhenitzyn's estimate, sixty million corpses to its credit, was defeated.
It
was defeated by those forces . I regard that complex as a good thing,
historically. In the second place, whatever Eisenhower may have said–
I won't go into the "Port Huron Statement," because I think it was cal–
low and, in its own way, hypocritical-the fact is that the idealism of
1962
turned into the terrorism of
I968
and it came from the same orga-
