Saw a documentary called Beyond Belief where some American women widowed by the 9/11 attacks started an organization to help Iraqi war widows. In one scene the Americans are sitting in a tiny concrete house with some of the Iraqi widows, who are asked what they know about events of 9/11. They have never seen video clips or pictures.
One of them says they’ve heard that on 9/11 some planes hit very tall buildings in America and killed people in the buildings. She emphasized “very tall” buildings, so someone asked if she knew how tall the buildings were. I don’t recall the exact number but she said something that was fewer than, say, 10 storeys. It occurred to me then that these women and indeed many people around the world who have never seen skyscrapers in pictures, much less tv, might think of anything higher than a few floors as really tall.
They had tons of sculptures in churches, though, including columns decorated with Biblic scenes. Images of saints have “atributes” which make them easy to identify: bald, bearded dude with a handful of keys = St Peter, who holds the keys of Heaven. The atributes are linked to what we know about the saint or to their patronages. Medieval Christians would be able to see pictures of lions in any depiction of the prophet Daniel, for example - whether the pictures look at all like a lion or more like a constipated pug with a perm is another matter.
Yes, I’ve seen Japanese woodcuts from the 1800’s of “western style” clothing; not quite. Some fanciful Church carvings and paintings before the renaissance show Greek and Romans dressed like the local court nobles, and so on. SOme people knew and saw very little for antiquity, while Italians had plenty of roman carvings to gauge the correct styles.
I saw something similar where many rural Afghans that a journalist was interviewing didn’t know that the 9/11 attacks occurred and that they were the catalyst that caused the invasion of their country. One man, when shown a picture of the Manhattan skyline asked “Is that Kabul?” Not only did he know almost nothing about America, he knew very little about his own country.
I don’t have the opportunity to search for the video right now but here’s an article I found quickly that reports: 92% of Aghans surveyed in southern provinces don’t know what 9/11 was.
I have run into numerous people here in Trinidad, even older people who don’t know what WW2 is or who were the combatants. This shocked me but my wife said why should they know or care? It didn’t effect them, there are some old era embattlements but that is it.
Same in Thailand. Despite a certain poster constantly insisting that Thailand was at the forefront of the war, it really wasn’t. It rolled over to the Japanese early on, and any action here was minimal. It’s best remembered now for the Bridge over the River Kwai. And many young Thais have no idea about WWII, even the educated ones.
Hell, Thais barely know anything about their neighboring countries. Those are all generally considered beneath them.
Well, unless you make a point to learn, as a westerner you may never hear about the Rape of Nanking or The Long March. In school we spent a lot of time learning about English monarchs and then the series of explorations and settlements that created North American society, but there are massive holes in our other learning --as to be expected. Other than Louis the Sun King and Mister Marie Antoinette, we don’t really hear about French kings. Ditto, other than Ferdinand and Isobel, we didn’t hear about Spanish monarchs. I bet not too many people could tell you about the Spanish civil war. That does not even begin to cover India or China or Thailand etc. Should we be surprised about backwater islands or foreign countries that don’t really worry about primarily western convulsions?
(Trivia question - what month was the October Revolution in Russia?)
The mountains I grew up with are nothing like that, being surrounded by other mountains; the closest one to being “The Peak Over There” is Moncayo and if you’re on it you can’t see its peak. Now, while I’ll admit that Moncayo and Aneto are dwarves compared with Kilimanjaro, they still kick the behind of most of what gets called a “mountain” in the UK.
ETA to md2000’s question: depends on whether you’re on the Julian or Gregorian calendar.
I agree, I was just giving an example of how even in our modern media saturated world if something doesn’t effect you it can go below your radar.
How many westerners know about the series of wars and genocides in the Congo and neighboring countries that I have seen called the Great African War, the deadliest and largest conflict since WW2? And this is within living memory of most adults.
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