It's 5:00am here, and I haven't slept yet, so I'm not going to do a great job of clarifying my point.

> This is again some kind of whitewashing the history where Europeans seem to have invented everything and nothing ever happened before them.

My point is basically that this person seems to believe that our current problem is whitewashing history, whereas I would argue that we have an equally pernicious problem, wherein western civilization is made out to be uniquely responsible for problems that are actually found all over the world, and throughout history.

A couple examples:

1.) The 1619 Project is an attempt to reframe the defining characteristic of the US and its founding as being uniquely fixated around slavery. Despite it existing in a world in which slavery had existed in virtually every civilization up to and beyond that point. And more importantly, despite it being one of, if not the purest embodiments of liberal governance explicitly outlined up until that point, since which its constitution has served as the foundational text for countless other nations to come, as well as the basis by which the abolition of slavery and the subsequent civil rights movements would come to follow...perhaps its least interesting feature, in slavery, is elevated to the forefront of the nation's character. We are so far down this rabbit hole that during the George Floyd crisis, we had congresswomen making claims that the existence of POLICE in the US (again, a concept that exists virtually the world over), are simply downstream from government officials whose purpose was to catch runaway slaves.

2.) The various attempts to go after logic/mathematics/scientific method as being constructions of the western patriarchy, arbitrarily imposed upon other cultures. If you are unaware of this movement, it is an academic argument that suggests that "western science" and "western medicine" are equally valid as, say, shamanistic practices of other cultures, and that things like logic and mathematics are simply held to an arbitrary standard of correctness due to a western-centric view of the world. All the while failing to acknowledge that we use Arabic numerals, contributions of Islamic scholars in the invention of algebra, or that concepts like the Pythagorean theorem were very much un-arbitrarily and independently arrived at within multiple cultures. So without even getting into the non-arbitrary nature of the correctness of logic and mathematics, attempts at accusing western civilization of whitewashing and imposing their modes of thinking onto the world, there is a complete failure to understand the cultures that contributed to those modes of thinking in the first place. There is literally a whitewashing of how influenced western civilization is by other cultures, when accusing western civilization of actively erasing other cultures with its modalities.

Maybe it's a sophomoric point, maybe I'm not getting it across clearly. I'm just finding a pattern among the self-flagellation of the west, that there's a certain beauty that seems to be lost in reducing the complicated way in which the west fits into the web of historical and contemporary civilizations to basically be one of oppression and whitewashing. For all of the whitewashing that may occur, I am simply making the point that there exists just as pernicious an issue in which the west is not framed as uniquely good and benevolent, but the precise opposite.

"When accusing western civilization of actively erasing other cultures with its modalities"

- It can't be discounted as a mere "accusation" when it is a "fact" that western civilisation, where-ever it went, systematically and categorically 'erased' the indigenous, and I am not saying metaphorically.

I live in NZ and the history and injustice here have been bloody, like any European occupied colony. The Maoris still suffer from systemic oppression here.

The cultural whitewashing is something that has always been operating at the intellectual echelons of 'European/white supremacy', they usually move into the scene to carry their jobs, after the military/warlords/mercenaries have cleared the scene.

And trust me, I do get the point you are trying to make, but that doesn't apply here. Nor I am saying that ideas from other cultures shouldn't be subjected to valid criticism or that Europeans should bear the brunt for it.

And if you do study history of other colonies a bit, you will find that police in colonies like India was created to instil the fear and British dominance in locals, with guns and batons.

The police there hasn't been reformed even now and is still brutal, following the same standards set by the British.

So there is a degree of truth in that congresswomen's words.

I think people are trying to correct the existing picture (ie the current popular history is good, too clean) by adding the bad for a truthful version with positives and negatives. It's one of those "we're arguing, but actually we're both right" situations.