You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses.
Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.
The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of.
Nazi Germany is what made it clear European civilization could incubate monsters? Absurd. Europe's entire history is one of atrocities. Hitler just applied what everyone else had been doing to Africa, to Europe—where and to whom it happened was the shock, not the dehumanization and mass murder and wanton destruction and boundless greed itself. Look elsewhere and you'll find the same—the powerless, and the abusers. Even the friggin' Buddhists were loan-sharks and remorseless murderers, from time to time, and educated plenty of brutal heads of state.
That's not enough to indict a vast millennia-long philosophical, cultural, and intellectual tradition—it's the fucking human condition. People've stacked high the skulls of The Other since before civilization. One might hope civilization counters that—and there's strong evidence it does—but we've been at this civilization thing for like 10,000+ years and haven't figure out how to get rid of it yet. That's not Western Civ's fault, it's just... us. Humans.
> The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of.
This is precisely what I'm saying, though. It was a predominant mood in the pre-war time that European society was enlightened and modern and superior to all others, and that this was a consequence of a Great History of Ideas starting from The Bible and Plato, finally coming to fruition in the then-present. It's absurd to believe these things about European civilization - or any known civilization! - but that's what people did.
I think it's clear by all the times I praised this "wonderful list of brilliant works", calling it "a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years", that I'm not trying to "indict" the Western tradition. There's a vast gulf between arguing that "deeply fetishizing [it] is problematic" and condemning it outright.
Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.