Victor Davis Hansen's book, Carnage and Culture, shows explicitly why Western civilization has been superior to all other world cultures for two and a half thousand years. This page shows just how superior Euro-American culture is by comparing Euro-American achievements to those of the Islamic world (including Europeanized Turkey).

The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral-- shackled rarely by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion, or ethics, by anything other than military necessity.
...Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom. They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself. The rare word "citizen" exists in the European vocabularies.
...Because free inquiry and rationalism are Western trademarks, European armies have marched to war with weapons either superior or equal to their adversaries, and have often been supplied far more lavishly through the Western marriage of capitalism, finance, and sophisticated logistics.
...Western capitalists and scientists alike have been singularly pragmatic and utilitarian, with little to fear from religious fundamentalists, state censors, or stern cultural conservatives. [pages 21-22]