Basically, this whole conversation came with an idea popping into my head. Leftists have to hear a lot about how they are the antithesis of "Western Civilization". However, we're just as valid as westerners as a lib or a CHUD. Why treat me like a foreigner in my own home country? Why do I even carry myself as a foreigner in my own country? That's because I don't think I hate western civilization.
I am simply against political forces that unjustly make others suffer for the benefit of a decadent, parasitical elite: whether it be rich people or a "desirable" ethnic/gender/etc in-group. This is neither unique to the west nor a core pillar of western civilization. However, I am accused of trying to "destroy western civilization" each time I say we should be nicer to black people or we should be more skeptical of oil companies. I don't think any of us get irrationally angry when we see the statue of David, or Ionic pillars. Plato's Republic doesn't have any passages on the importance of destroying the environment for the benefit of the wealthy, nor does it have any passage of relentlessly bullying people who have a different skin color or anyone who fucks in a way that makes the Christian God that no one is aware of yet when Plato's Republic was written upset.
However, this shows how successful the capitalists infestation of our cultural zeitgeist is: where if you criticize these oligarchs, people think you are criticizing the way of life of western civilization.
We're against the fake boundary that is called "the west". What they call "western civilization" seems to be founded upon the neo-platonist and aristotlean idealism that was integrated into catholicism after Constantine co-opted christianity. It's quite politically expedient to ingrain idealism into the superstructure as you never have to deliver materially and it's also quite politically expedient to recuperate the effective belligerence of monotheism into your imperialist project. They try to say all progress comes from this system, but when understood through a materialist lens it has been severely hindered by the intangibility of idealism. Da Vinci did not produce so much because he had found the right ideas in the western canon, he produced so much because he had the free time and material abundance afforded by the accident of birth in the material abundance available in the italian republics. Thousands of people who could be Da Vinci's have died uneducated, forced to toil in the fields of grain or war.