INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
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nization, with the same name, anyway: I mean
50S.
Also, the attacks on
the World Trade Center were actually justified by the people who made
them in the terms that you yourself have used. The target was precisely
the symbol of American capitalism and the symbol of American mili–
tarism. And, again, my answer to that is, apart from the evil it perpe–
trated and the massacre of the individuals who were part of that
abstraction, they were attacking the center of a civilization which in my
judgment ranks with the great civilizations of human history, which has
provided its citizenry, including the poorest of its citizens, with more
freedom, more prosperity, more widely shared than any society known
to human history. And to talk about it as evil is itself a species of evil.
Art Meyer:
Which I did not do.
Norman Podhoretz:
No, you didn't, but the people who attacked the
country did. I'm being as emphatic as I can. I don't think they have a
case, whatever they may think. They think we're evil.
Art
Meyer:
My question might be better phrased if I were to ask whether
somewhere in your writings there is an eva luation of the consequences
of American corporate expansionism throughout the world. The conse–
quences, sir? Not that it is a bad system, but that in some instances dur–
ing its expansion we had to have regulations, we had to moderate our
own capitalistic development, because it did go to excess . By the 1870S,
1880s, and 1890S, there were some pretty bad working conditions,
some serious poverty, that corporate heads were not paying much atten–
tion to. Labor unions were born, regulations out of Washington, regu–
lations regarding interstate commerce, a ll kinds of things. Might we not
be in the same state regarding corporate expansionism overseas? I don't
know much about the World Trade Organization, but I think there is
buried within it some desire to moderate and to regulate capitalism as
well as to see it expand and to spread its benefits worldwide.
Norman Podhoretz: The
World Trade Organization is regarded by most
of the Left as just the opposite. My view is that the spread of Ameri–
canization, American economic power, throughout the world, has
resulted in greater prosperity rather than less for more people. Also, I
want to protest against the insinuation of excessive force in the Midd le
East. That's a different question, but you just let that slip by as though
it were a self-evident proposition that Israel's measures taken in self-
