“Given the images people see on
TV, many conclude Afghanistan never made it out of the Middle
Ages,” writes Mohammad Qayoumi at Retronaut. “But that is not the
Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and ’60s.
Stirred by the fact that news portrayals of the country’s history
didn’t mesh with my own memories, I wanted to discover the
truth.”
Qayoumi’s
gallery of what the Graveyard of Empires looked like before it
was brought into contemporary civilization by the Hippie
Trail, ;Soviet modernization, Taliban discipline and
American nation-building is at once endearing, heartbreaking and
disturbing. Because it turns out pre-modern Afghanistan looked
pretty, well, modern. ;
There are Afghans of the Mad Men era going to the
movies: ;
…taking kids to the playground:
…shopping for decadent clothing: ;
…getting around town using state-of-the-art transit
systems:
…and even attending college classes in sensible
skirts: ;
More. ;
The degrading of fashion is bad, but it’s not the worst thing.
(Even in America, where mayors can’t even be
bothered to wear neckties when greeting schoolchildren, people
think nothing of dressing
like slobs for every occasion.) What’s disturbing is that
actual civilzational retrograde is so rare in the modern world that
you can almost believe it never happens. Even a few years after
World War II, most Western Europeans had a higher standard of
living than they had had before the war. Yet here you have a
country that was apparently not in the dark ages, but got there as
fast as it could. ;
See original article here -
Pictures of Afghanistan in the Fifties and Sixties Are Totally Depressing
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