The people of Mongolia are currently celebrating the Thousand Camel Festival in the Gobi Desert. The aim of the festival has been to raise awareness amongst Mongolians of the role the Bactrian camel has played in their culture for thousands of years.
Since the advent of motorised transport, the Bactrian camel’s numbers have fallen precipitously to the point where it has become “endangered.” This has caused some scientists to question whether the camel’s numbers were in fact kep unnaturally high due to their usefulness to humans, and whether their current “endangered” status is merely a “correction”. Mongolia’s communist government has repeatedly rejected that such market factors could be a cause for the camel’s dwindling numbers.
This Guardian article presents some marvellous pictures from a couple of years ago of the Mongolian people celebrating their connection with their past. It fails to mention, however, that the government of Mongolia has rejected repeated calls to apologise for its genocidal campaigns of conquest and racism throughout Asia, the Middle East and Europe many centuries ago. The XYZ beleives that a grassroots movement dedicated to organising a national “Sorry Day” remains on the political fringe.
One can’t but help feel slightly sickened at the faux-innocent smiles on the faces of the descendents of such monsters, whose culture was the first to bring racism and bigotry into the world, on the backs of beasts such as these.
Oh wait, hang on..
Photo by wildxplorer 