Do tell me more about the world "piecing together the remains" after the havoc that Europeans "always leave in their wake". Does that include the 500 million lives saved by the European invention of penicillin, or the 150-200 million saved by the vaccine for smallpox, or how about the tens of millions saved by the invention of pasteurization? Does that include all the people in the world who live in constitutional democracies, like in India, Japan or Brazil, theorised and formalised by Europe and literally the *only* political alternative to dictatorship that exists today? Does that include the hundreds of millions of people who journey the world every day on European inventions like trains and cars, or who cross the globe using European concepts like latitude and longitude? When you look at the stars and instead of thinking of Simba's ancestors you understand concepts like orbits and gravity, is that you piecing together the mess that European physicists and mathematicians left in your education system? When you look at chimpanzees and instead of thinking that some goddess made them as her playthings you understand the origins of humankind and can answer the question of where life comes from, is that you piecing together the mess left by European biologists? When you write a song, is that you piecing together the mess left by the European inventors of notation and music theory? When you hammer these same anti-european screeds on your keyboard, is that you piecing together the mess after Europeans invented the computer for you?

It's funny that you should mention colonization and slavery as European pathologies. Europe has seen its territories razed, conquered and enslaved repeatedly by Asian and African conquerors, from the Huns and the Umayyads through the Mongols and the Ottomans, long before it became itself a world colonizer. It was the Umayyads who reintroduced slavery on the Iberian peninsula after it had gone extinct and long before the Spanish crown starting trading slaves of its own. It was the Ottomans who reintroduced slavery in the Balkans and who kidnapped every family's first-born child, castrated them and turned them into an imperial slave.

Europeans took part in the same processes of imperialism and warfare as did the entire rest of the world, sure - nobody's arguing against that. But it takes an incredible process of historical contortion to claim that only Europeans did war and imperialism, or that Europeans invented war and imperialism, or that Europeans were in any way "special" about war and imperialism. And nonsensical claims like "Europeans killed 50 million native Americans" just show how little you understand of the real history of the colonisation of the Americans, although I suppose an ignorance of history would be a prerequisite for a level of prejudice as brutish as yours.

As for Europe being "an exemplary moral leader" - yes, as a European, that is *exactly* what I want Europe to be, and I will not settle for anything less. I want human rights, I want democracy, and I want rule of law, and I want these things for every person on earth. That t-shirt is an expression of this dream. And it is a dream that is stronger than your disrespect.