Western Civilization and Sliced Bread

A few years ago I was watching election coverage on a cable channel and a panel were discussing election results. One of the panelist was a member of Congress named Steve King whom I believe is from Nebraska.  Someone asked King a question about minorities and he pointed out that the greatest thing to happen to native Americans & Africans and even the rest of the world was being introduced to western civilization.
          He went on to say that the persons of color who occupy 75% of the planet would effectively be backward savages had they not been enlightened by benevolent Europeans who brought them culture and technology. The rest of the panel sat stunned as if he'd just publicly relieved himself on the desk at which they sat. One of the fellow panelists asked "You don't honestly believe that do you?" He said that every major invention had come from Europe of people of European dissent and he could think of no BETTER civilization. There was an awkward silence and in that brief silence part of me wished that someone would have walked up to him and caved in the back of his skull with a mace.

               it's been said that "winners write the history books" and given that I live in a country founded BY western Europeans it stands to reason that every history I read prior to attending college was told from the point of view of the western European who felt it was his DESTINY to rule a country that covered a continent. It spoke of the indigenous people who lived on the land as "hostile" and treated them as "obstacles" to progress.  In passing it mentioned small pox depleting their numbers and Americans killing buffalo for sport until their numbers dwindled.  It mentions slavery ONLY in the context of a civil war but barely mentions the people of color who were slaves on tobacco, cotton, rice and sugar plantations from the days of British colonialism until the end of a civil war fought by those who wanted to ensure the right to own them extended for all eternity.
              My history books barely MENTIONED the Jim Crow laws written in the 1870s which remained on the books until I was a high school senior in 1988.

       
             When I studied the WORLD'S history in college I learned that Africa had NOT been a bunch of cannibals with plates in their lips who ate white explorers in pith helmets, but vibrant civilizations like Zimbabwe, the Egyptians, Cush, Sheba, Ethiopia & Mali. I learned about 14th century King Mansa Musa who was said to have been the wealthiest man who ever lived. A legend says that when he made a haj to Mecca his caravan gave away and spent so much gold in tribute that he collapsed several small economies.  I learned about Africans trading in gold and diamonds and metal foundries in Zimbabwe which predate anything in Europe but that never made most of the history books I'd read before.
           I learned of people in central and western Africa who invented farming techniques that were exploited in the United States when their descendants were sold into slavery and brought to the Carolinas. In high school I'd never heard Mansa Musa's name and the only African kingdom I'd heard of was the Egyptians, but the history I learned said that they were Europeans. Truthfully Alexander the Great took over Egypt and the Ptolemaic Greeks DID eventually rule Egypt, but the original Egyptians did NOT have fair skin. I read about the European "dark ages" after the collapse of the Roman Empire" and the renaissance which came about to rise from it, but don't remember ever reading about a "dark age" anywhere in Africa or Asia.
 
             I learned about the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan and how when the Chinese invented gun powder they initially refused to use if for military applications as they considered it too inhumane. I learned about Indians inventing the concept of "zero" and Islamic scholars devising Algebra. I learned about how mechanical clocks and paper were invented in China, (papyrus had existed in Egypt centuries earlier) and at the time Europeans still used sun dials.
                I learned of the civilizations of the Americas which had languages written in glyphs. I read about some native cultures who had systems of government not unlike direct democracies which had councils.

           The purpose of this piece is NOT to speak ill of western civilization, to paint it as one of conquest or anything of the sort, but merely to point out that HAD Europe simply traded with Africa, Asia & America the way they traded with one another, that the world in which we live would be a much different place. We wouldn't have random "Supremacists" who were brainwashed to believe the patronizing, racist justification some had for Europeans plundering the world for her riches and that Kipling's "White Man's Burden"is just a poem written by a man who was born into a charmed existence in an "India" created by a British East India company for its executives who ruled with brutality as they took, tea, spices cotton and all they could from the conquered people whose culture they denied had defeated the armies of Alexander the Great centuries earlier.