Atheist bigwig Sam Harris: “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”
This has never occurred to Sam Harris
In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
Posted on November 18, 2012, in are these guys 12 years old?, atheism minus, misogyny, narcissism, rape and tagged atheism, misogyny, rape, sam harris. Bookmark the permalink. 504 Comments.
My guess is that he doesn’t know in what contexts most rapes occur. There’s a huge amount of otherwise well-meaning people (both men and women) who haven’t been violated themselves and only think of “stranger jumping from a bush” kind of violent rapes or horror stories of religiously motivated gang rapes as rapes.
It’s a case of “always assume ignorance over malice”, to me at least, and judging by practical experience it’s true. If/when ignorance is proven not to be the excuse, like in the case of lots of MRA’s, then it has to be malice.
Honestly, am I the only one here who feels that the whole name-calling and phantasies about torture are a little bit childish? Somehow, the whole question seems a little bit to complicated to me to just answer “Wah! Rape bad! Everything else better!”.
First of all: We can agree that rape is bad and that removing it from the world completely would have a great, measurable positive influence. X (with X being the number of rapes world-wide today) less rapes means many people could stay happy instead of raped. World would, no doubt about that, become a much better place without rape.
But, many people seem to dismiss the other side too easily: Of course, getting rid of religion would have effects. But what would these effects be? Honestly, we can’t be sure. One way to think about it would be to consider the extremes:
On the one side, getting rid of religion could show us, that the positive effects of religion were greater than (or at least equal to) the negative effects, effectively making this a bad choice.
On the other side, getting rid of religion could make the earth a much better place, removing oppression of woman, religious fights, fanatics and terrorists, etc and bringing us a golden age of science and reason. Remember that religion does not only have negative effects on atheists, but mainly on other religious people – of the same faith or other ones. It could well be that the negative sides of religions are much greater than the positive ones.
Obviously, this is reality, so the result will probably not be any of the extremes, but somewhere between. Just where is as good as anyone’s guess.
So what is the right decision? Honestly? I don’t know. Getting rid of rape would obviously the “secure” choice, the one you can take without having to take any risks. Getting rid of religion, on the other hand, could lead to a much happier world – but it could also not. But starting to insult people and fantasize about torture (funnily as it may be intended) doesn’t seem to be the best answer…
@eline “shame on him” would also work
Think this guy better brush up on just how many rapes occur worldwide, how frequently and why. Yes, religion can be a major instigator of wars and violence. But rape happens for many other reasons as well including cultural practices, politics, population oppression, genocide, racism, abelism and just general opportunity to do so and not get caught.
In short, removing religion only removes a small portion of the justifications people use. And I see how self serving removing his personal stumbling block for not being a believer or not catching STDs is.
Bhuddism is not a religion, but it is a spiritual belief system that helps to guide its practiconers through moral problems. Which is also what other religions strive for as well. And of course he practices a spiritual system that teaches that women are inheritantly unable to achieve higher enlightenment unless they are reborn male. Gee, maybe he can tellus the problem with that thinking and how its any different from all the other major religions?
You’re wrong if you believe that Buddhism has no dark sides and only brings happiness, etc. Not all Buddhists are bored Californians or members of the Simpsons family :-) For example, the Tibetan version of Buddhism lead to a horrible theocracy, where the biggest part of the population was effectively enslaved, justified by the religion and the lamas.
And of course, don’t forget the no matter how peaceful a religion may be, it still teaches an irrational world view, forcing it’s believers to value some dogmas over a critical mind, which opens up the possibilities for fraud, quacks, etc. For example, if people weren’t brought up to believe that there are supernatural forces at work, people telling them to spend all their money for astrological “counseling” would have a lot more problem.
No, sorry, Buddhism isn’t that perfect example religion some atheists seem to want to make out of it. It’s still irrational, it’s still wrong and it still has it’s dark places.
Oh and just cause it’s in the post, A+ is a giant circle jerk, I don’t recommend any atheist go there unless they are into that sort of thing.
Probably waving his magic wand a lot. By himself.
I’m a he.
And I’m not saying that Hitchens is somehow above criticism, but he was in no way a conservative. He didn’t kowtow to ideology, though, so yes, he deviated from the liberal party line in a few isolated instances. Whether or not I agree with him on those deviations is not relevant. I wish more people had that kind of fucking integrity. Plus, he was one of the best writers of this generation, and I do think a lot of the Hitchens haters have sour grapes about it.
And where is this misogyny charge coming from? Is it seriously all over the women aren’t funny thing?! He was trolling, and by all measures trolling very successfully.
Conclusion, Hitchens was awesome.
Why would you assume that people here of all places are suffering from “sour grapes” about Hitchens being a good writer? Most of us like good writers. It’s some of the things that he believed that we take issue with.
Honestly, there are very few circumstances in which “you’re just jealous” as an argument as to why someone doesn’t like something doesn’t make the person saying it look kind of childish.
Yeah, Hitchens was a childish, petulant misogynist who was utterly convinced of his own superiority to pretty much everyone on the planet. If you like his writing, good for you, but don’t pretend that makes him a liberal darling or that it makes people who don’t like him ‘jealous’. There’s a pretty good roundup of why I’m not so keen on him here. You don’t have to share my reasons.
Was he trolling when he said that “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.”?
You do know that saying wildly offensive and generally arseholeish things – even if you don’t believe them (and we all know he did believe it) – in the name of ‘trolling’ doesn’t excuse the fact that you’re being an utter tool, right?
This is something one hears frequently… and well, it’s true if one has a very narrow definition of religion.
Buddhism, originally, taught that the gods are themselves subject to birth and rebirth (although they’re powerful and incredibly long-lived) and can’t save you from this cycle – only your own efforts can do so. So, if one defines religion as believing that god or gods can save you, it wasn’t a religion to start with. Nowadays many buddhists (at least in the west) don’t believe in gods at all, so if one defines religion as belief in god/gods, it’s not a religion.
Still, as long as one believes in reincarnation and the possibility of escaping reincarnation through reaching enlightenment, my linguistic intuitions tell me it should still be labelled a “religion”… I’d agree it’s just a “belief system” if you remove that too.
Btw: Didn’t Dawkins have this super-wide definition of religion according to which communism counts as one?
So the many Buddhists who DO believe in gods, devas, ancestors, or spirits get declared “not a religion” because of those who don’t? Or is Buddhism a religion to some and not to others?
I would say that non-Buddhists who declare Buddhism “not a religion” might be operating on a very Western-centric definition of “religion”, but that opens the question of whether the very concept of “religion” is western-centric. And of course, as a non-Buddhist myself, I have to acknowledge that my opinion that it at least looks like a religion is probably not worth much, either…
“Religion” is very much a Western concept. One of the best evidences of this is in China and Japan. If you ask them whether or not they’re religious, most of them will laugh at you. If you ask them whether or not they’re atheists, they’ll laugh at you again.
Both countries have a (relatively) small population of atheists (larger than the US, I think, but not by much), but an even smaller population of “religious” because they don’t have a concept of religion, at least not like we here in the West do. What they understand is spirituality and philosophy, and that’s how they identify.
Nathan, dude, that comment was so steeped in “mystery of the Orient” style racial and cultural stereotypes that reading it felt like jumping in a time machine. Knock it off.
(Buddhism and Shinto? Both actual religions.)
Meanwhile, we have the people who go on and on about how ~brilliant~ he was and what a ~great writer~ he was whenever his sexism is brought up.
That’s another thing – historically speaking a lot of great writers have been very sexist. This is not a new concept.
It’s pretty funny to see someone getting upset that not everyone liked Hitchens given the whole “contrarian” persona that he deliberately cultivated.
@CassandraSays…
Um… huh?
That’s what I’ve learned in pretty much every single one of my Cultural Anthropology classes, starting with Intro, then Anthropology of Religion, Development of Ancient Civilizations (while talking about Ancient China and the development of spiritual systems there… we didn’t get to Buddhism, however), and Anthropology of the East.
This is what they’re teaching in Anthropology courses in college.
I think what you’re missing here is the difference between what people think you mean if you say to them “are you religious?” and whether or not an answer of “no” actually means that they don’t practice a religion.
Just because a religion’s rituals and the way that people follow it doesn’t look like the Abrahamic religions doesn’t mean that it’s not actually a religion, and that people aren’t actually following it. I can see why, say, Zen might confuse Westerners from that perspective, but if anyone can look at Tibetan Buddhism and say “that’s not a religion” then I think they have some very odd and limited ideas about what a religion is.
(I actually had a version of this conversation once with a friend who was raised Zen Buddhist, in Hokkaido. Apparently from her perspective “being religious” means “going to the temple all the time like Mom does”, so she’d answer “no” to your question, but she still identifies as a Buddhist and leans on her religion during difficult times.)
@CassandraSays
Oh I see what you’re saying.
I’ve just been taught that it was us (Westerners) who came up with the whole concept of religion in the first place (well, actually, ancient Egyptians, if I’m not mistaken, came up with the basis, but it was generally defined much more recently, at least as an anthropological concept), and so while, yes, according to definition, Tibetan Buddhism is a religion, it’s practitioners wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as such or call it such(?). They would just say “I’m a Buddhist” as opposed to “I’m a religious Buddhist”.
At least, that’s how I’ve understood it…
Maybe I’m being taught wrong. Always possible. Any racism is entirely unintentional on my part and I apologize for it.
Anthropology isn’t inherently a racism-free discipline, especially given that it has historically involved finding an exciting foreign Other and trying to explain their culture in terms of Western categories.
China and Japan are industrialized countries whose people have had ample contact with the West, our pop culture, our religions and our definitions thereof. I don’t know much about China, but in Japan people definitely have a concept of religion and the differences between them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent all that effort trying to stamp out Buddhism, and they wouldn’t have more New Religious Movements than almost any other country (indeed, the term was coined by Japanese scholars).
In my experience that’s how a lot of Americans, especially younger ones, use the word. “Being religious” means being a Jesus Freak or going to church every Sunday. It’s why “spiritual but not religious” is such a common identifier here.
But see, that’s a totally imperialist perspective, the idea that if other people don’t do religion like we do, or don’t approach it from the same perspective, then they’re not actually religious. It’s taking our idea of what it means to be involved in a religion and imposing that frame on other people, which isn’t cool.
Also, if we were to accept this theory that that part of the world just doesn’t really do religion, explain why so many Korean people are Baptist.
@ emily
Yeah, in my experience that’s exactly how everyone who I know who’s Japanese sees “being religious”. They think it means doing lots of stuff, performing tasks/rituals, rather than being about what you believe or what you feel internally. By that standard, no, most younger people aren’t religious, just like they aren’t in Europe, but we still recognize that most Europeans are in some way involved in a religion, so it feels weird and creepy and racist to me to act like when people in Asia do the same it means they’re just not culturally wired for religion.
IME it’s actually pretty hard to find academic discussions of that part of the world over here that aren’t steeped in weird racist assumptions. It’s getting better, I think, but it’s still an issue.
Also ! You really can’t have a conversation about religious expression in modern China without taking into consideration the effects of communism.
Hm.
Both of you bring up a great point. I will amend that hole in my thinking.
That makes me wonder though if the concept of “cultural relativism” might be at least a little racist, then, cause it’s in the name of that we’re taught to understand that not everyone “recognizes” religion “like we do” (“we” being those of us in the West).
SO what you’re saying is that you aren’t familiar with criticism of hitchens for being sexist, but you’re sure that everyone who makes that criticism is just jealous. You’re of course clever enough to know better than everyone else who actually bothered to look into it for a moment.
Why would anyone care about what you think of anything? You’ve put your shitty reasoning ability on display for everyone in a mere two sentences.
Skyrimjob – you’re also assuming everyone admires Hitchens’s writing style. Wrong. I don’t, and I sure as hell am not envious of it. Even if I did, it doesn’t excuse the content.
Today I learned that if someone is a good writer they are beyond criticism.
Where the hell did Skyrimjob get the idea that Hichens is a great writer? He isn’t even a great atheist writer. His writing is steeped in self-love and brooding resentment that anyone might have different beliefs, likes, or dislikes than he does, or that they might not recognize his brilliance.
My parents keep buying me subscriptions of The Atlantic and he’s one of their many questionable staff choices. Here he is huffily whining about the existence of liberal comedians.
(For the record, I’d consider PZ Myers to be a good atheist writer.)
Hey, Skyrimjob, did you happen to read that Atlantic article? Because if not, here’s a quote for you.
If I too was a petty, childish person I might be tempted to call that little rant sour grapes on the part of Hitchens.
Katz, that was the single most boring article about comedy I’ve ever read.
@Emily Goddess, good point. I should say that if you define religious as believing in God/gods then lots of buddhists, at least in the west, aren’t religious.
Anyway, people who say they want to wipe out religion should make a clear definition to accompany that claim. Like, professor Torbjörn Tännsjö on our institution labels himself an atheist and is a member of Humanisterna (Swedish atheist organisation). Still, former arch bishop of Sweden K G Hammar once claimed that he considers Tännsjö religions, because he counts Tännsjö’s metaethical theory (Plato-inspired substantive moral realism) a kind of religion. Should his views be wiped or not?
It really doesn’t matter because there’s no definition that wouldn’t make that an asshole belief.
Going around Tumblr. Can I not simply enjoy a few Simblrs without MRAs INVADING MY SPACE?!?!?!?!?!? Some of these are direct results of living in a patriarchy, others are…..sigh.
>I would say that non-Buddhists who declare Buddhism “not a religion” might be operating on a very Western-centric definition of “religion”
They’re mostly using the western definition of Buddhism, which has been both informed by philosophers of enlightement and a rather small group of japanese Buddhists who successfully sold their specific brand of it to the european parts of the world.
>Being called a sexual deviant or a pervert because you were expressing your sexuality
Expressing your sexuality in a dance number accompanied by a song, like in a Broadway show, is never okay.
I mean other than when you’re actually in a Broadway production about your sexuality.
@Katz: I agree, but if they were being intellectually honest assholes they should clarify exactly what they mean by religion.
At my job, I’m basically the only theist. Some atheists you can have interesting conversations regarding religion with… while others just want to label me non-religious. Like my idea of God isn’t precise enough or anthropomorphic enough or whatever to count as a religious one. I think it’s analogous to fat-phobic people telling an obviously fat friend that “NOOOOO you’re NOT fat, you’re maybe curvaceous but not FAT!”.
I’ll have to take your word for it, but this wouldn’t surprise me. One of the things Buddhism does have in common with Christianity is that it is very old and comprised of a kajillion sects, each with its own theology or philosophy or local variants. We can’t extrapolate Buddhism from Zen or the Dalai Lama any more than one could extrapolate Christianity from the Methodism or the Pope. And Western understanding of Buddhism would be filtered through colonialism, racism, and the biases of whichever Buddhist was telling us about it.
It’s also important to keep in mind that not all Buddhists are monastics, so even if the literate clergy who spend all day thinking about theology and cosmology say Buddhism has no gods, that doesn’t change what the average Joe is doing – and outside of India, the average Joe is practicing a Buddhism that was introduced alongside the indigenous religion(s) of his area. The Japanese, for example, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinbutsu_sh%C5%ABg%C5%8Ddeliberately tried to blend them.
I’m an atheist, but I think that if religion were to be wiped out, like, if everyone in the planet suddenly woke up and went “Huh, religion is dumb, I’m not gonna do it anymore”, I suspect very little would change. Assholes who use religion as an excuse to be assholes would simply find another excuse, like for instance “the greater good”, that one’s always a crowd pleaser. Some of the awful entrenched religious groups would find their religious power removed, but they still have a lot of financial and political clout, so they could probably repackage themselves as something different and continue doing the crap they’ve been doing all along.
Continuing: There seems to be something of that in the Harris interview as well. He calls dogmatic communism a “political religion”, because they believed stuff for dogmatic, non-evidence-based reasons. So basically his definition of religion is being dogmatic and believing stuff for no reason. Now, this will probably exclude some people who self-identify as religious (he might wanna exclude Immanuel Kant for instance) but it includes loads of people who identify as atheists. The old Soviet dictators and their devote followers obviously, but also the more stupid members of the modern atheism movement who has no grasp about what science is, how it operates, what kind of things can or cannot be investigated by empirical means etc, but still worships this thing called science that they don’t know shit about.
He does make some good points about atheism not leading to moral disaster by pointing to Sweden and other countries where a large portion of the population is atheist. Religious people who claim that God is necessary to underpin morality are obviously wrong. And you know, if you DEFINE religion as “dogmatic beliefs for no reason” I totally agree that it’s a bad thing (although I wouldn’t want to narrow down “reason” to “epistemological reason”). I just can’t see why you would define it in that way.
It’s sort of like I agree with him that if you define free will as “godlike power to create yourself out of nothing” than no, we don’t have free will, but I can’t see any reason for the definition.
Which should keep them busy for a while. I did my undergrad in Religious Studies, and after we took the course on definitions of religion, our senior thesis project was to create and defend our own definition. It’s surprisingly difficult.
And anyway, if these guys took a second to define religion before railing against it, they might have to admit that their definition only fits a certain slice of the religious pie (typically the Abrahamic religions, or specifically Christianity with a side of the currently trendy Islamophobia).
I have the opposite problem. I’m pretty sure there’s no God, but I consider myself religious because I belong to and attend a church.
Whoops, broken link above. Try this
Hitchens was a hack. He may not have been a “Conservative”, but you’d have a hard time (apart from the tribal marker of his atheism making him an outlier) telling his views from that of any other neocon.
He wasn’t brilliant, he was facile. He took bog-standard arguments and dressed them up with pretty invective. As with William F. Buckley the charade of “genius” falls apart when you look past the method, and look at the message.
Kill Brown People? Check.
Torture People? Check.
Women suck? Check.
Even if my estimation is wrong, and he was a genius, Hitchens was an ass.
You know, it’s pretty funny when someone calls Hitchens a “hack” in prose so vastly inferior to Hitchens’ own that I’m reminded of cave scratchings.
Where the hell did Skyrimjob get the idea that Hichens is a great writer? He isn’t even a great atheist writer. His writing is steeped in self-love and brooding resentment that anyone might have different beliefs, likes, or dislikes than he does, or that they might not recognize his brilliance.
That’s wrong and ridiculous. Literally objectively wrong.
PZ Myers may be more in line with your political beliefs (the same is probably true of me), and his writing is adequate for what he does. But to mention his writing in the same breath as Hitchens’ is a cosmic joke.
Skyrimjob – you’re also assuming everyone admires Hitchens’s writing style. Wrong. I don’t, and I sure as hell am not envious of it. Even if I did, it doesn’t excuse the content.
What are you talking about?! If you don’t like his style, fine (although I’d argue that even if it’s not your thing he objectively has an amazing command over the language). But, okay, I’ve got his collection Arguably open right now. It’s mostly insightful book reviews, superb essays on American history, and other assorted Americana. Plus, the women aren’t funny thing. Again, Hitchens was a LOT more than just a critic of Islam.
Oh, great. now we’re doing the literary version of the “Radiohead is the best band ever!” conversation we had with Mr Al.
I read Hitchens.
I liked Hitchens at the time.
Then I grew up and stopped being a teenager who resented the world and a lot of his cleverness turned out to be not-so-clever.
Funny, that.
This is literally the highest ratio of “words clearly not understood by the writer” to “words used in a single sentence” I’ve ever seen.
I read Hitchens.
I liked Hitchens at the time.
Then I grew up and stopped being a teenager who resented the world and a lot of his cleverness turned out to be not-so-clever.
Funny, that.
Yeah, what you mean is, you jumped on the annoying haterade bandwagon that pops up around anything popular.
Because the only reason people might not be instantly and forever enamoured of a misogynist blowhard is their instinctive hatred of popularity. Of course.
Ok, whatever, Christopher Hitchens was the best writer of all time.
Who gives a shit? What does that have to do with anything?
Oh no not the haterade!
I’ll grant that he had an interesting turn of phrase. That he used it to dress up bog standard stupidity and hatred does not make him a genius. The guy was a classic narcissist and whether you loved or hated him you just fed his monumental nd extremely fragile ego.
The use of the word “haterade” really adds to the overall sense of maturity here, don’t you think?
I actually liked Hitchens when he was in his taking down the cult of Mother Theresa stage. But then he either turned into a neocon or outed himself as one and I was just terribly embarrassed for him.
Skyrimjob: You know, it’s pretty funny when someone calls Hitchens a “hack” in prose so vastly inferior to Hitchens’ own that I’m reminded of cave scratchings.
Ooh! I am crushed, devastated, I shall crawl into a hole and die… someone who thinks the written word, in any form, is akin to cat scratchings has made the argument that to understand when someone is a hack one must be a better writer, in their estimation, than the person accused of hackery.
That’s like saying one can’t pan a restaurant if one isn’t a professionally trained chef, able to whip up something better.
Moreover, that you like Hitchens writing puts you in a suspect place when you attack his critics with that line of argument. It’s not only logically wrong, it’s morally suspect.
I understand that we are attacking someone whom you idolize. I also see that you aren’t actually defending Hitchens, so much as attacking us.
Show us some of the brilliant argument,and stellar writing, you think he’s done.
Because the only example on the page is him slamming Betty Friedan for being not funny, and saying Al Franked was a hit because he was a partisan hack with good control of his face.
It wasn’t exactly Pulitzer prize-winning stuff, and this, although I’d argue that even if it’s not your thing he objectively has an amazing command over the language, isn’t supported by the examples present; to say nothing of having a specious claim (where is the “objective” touchstone to hold his prose against? Did he string a coherent sentence together, sure, but so can I (even if you don’t like the style), and so can my 13 year old sister.
But the merits of his prosody are subjective. I find it, as I said, facile. It’s cheap shots (Franken is a Partisan Hardliner), and self-induldgent airs of s being above it all. His greatest failing (in my opinion) is that same injection of his seld into the writing he did. He was an objectionable shit, and that’s what I see in his work.
When all is said and done, he was selling himself, as anti-hero, and I didn’t care for it. He could have the stylistic expertise of Neruda, Pushkin and Marlowe, all rolled into one, and it would still suck, because his subect was cheap and tawdry.
Skyrimjob, are you an objectivist too?
b/c I read howard’s post and the first thing I thought was, “Oh, like Ayn Rand.”
@blitzgal
‘Make-up isn’t even an option’
Then you have not seen some of the men I have.
If I too was a petty, childish person I might be tempted to call that little rant sour grapes on the part of Hitchens.
Ha! That little foot-stomp is the second funniest thing I’ve ever heard from Hitchens. “Stupid girls, laughing at a mere comedian when they had a golden opportunity to fawn over me, their superior! Didn’t they notice how brilliantly I talked over that female? Truly my genius is wasted on hoi polloi!”
The funniest thing I’ve ever heard from Hitchens is those noises he made when they waterboarded him. Come on, that was comedy gold.
But then he either turned into a neocon or outed himself as one and I was just terribly embarrassed for him.
Drinkin’ the Hate20, I see. Sure, Hitchens broke with liberal ideology sometimes- and whether or not I agree, I have to respect his integrity on that front. But to call him a “neocon” is ridiculous.
Skyrimjob, are you an objectivist too?
Of course not.
Oh, and is Skyrimjob MRAL? Kind of sounds like him
Why should that be obvious?
You respect the integrity of people who’re pro-torture? That’s certainly an interesting approach to ethics.
The funniest thing I’ve ever heard from Hitchens is those noises he made when they waterboarded him. Come on, that was comedy gold.
And he revised his position on waterboarding as torture, making himself look a little bit dumb in the process. A less principled person wouldn’t have.
You know, you guys, and the rest of the post-mortem Hitchens haters that have grown like mold since his death, are a bunch of opportunistic turds. Half of the people talking shit about him would never have had the sack to do so when he was alive. I especially can’t believe all the atheists shitting on him. Seriously ungrateful.
So…is nobody allowed to dislike Hitchens at any level without being a hater?
Does that apply to all writers, or all atheist writers, or just him?
Atomic mutant, yes the issue is possibly more nuanced than we are having. So what?
Misogyny isn’t going to go away when religion does. Wars won’t go away when religion does. Terrorism won’t go away when religion does. Why? Religion, nationalism, the need for terror tactics are all justifications for a deeper underlying problem. So you remove one justification. People, particularly those in power will use the other justifications and invent new ones. And the misery will march on.
Or, I guess, all dead people?
Hitchens got waterboarded?