Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Genghis Khan's Shock and Awe & Mobile Homes

From our The Far Side of the Story department.

The documentary "Mongolia" is fun to watch. The narrator talks way too fast, almost as if the makers needed to compensate for the lost decades under the Soviet sponsored regime that made Mongolia pretty much unreachable for most Westerners for the better part of the 20th century.

But once you take the deep breath the narrator never takes, it is a fun little film, as we said.

The country's most famous son, Genghis Khan, features prominently, of course, next to horses, nature, restored temples, the big capital Ulan Bator, and more nature. Mongolian throat singing, contortionists, camels and a huge open pit copper mine get air time, and the ethnic minorities in some corners of the central Asian nation are portrayed fondly.

Here are two things that made us chuckle, though. As they show a thundering mass of mounted warriors re-enacting the feared Mongolian cavalry of the Khan, the narrator points out that the great Khan invented the military strategy of the "flash war" still used today.

There you go. Genghis Khan invented "Shock and Awe"!

Of course, you may have noticed the similarity of the "flash" and the "Blitz", and yes, in terms of concept and execution, shock and awe is nothing but ye olde blitz reloaded with depleted uranium.

The documentary also has a brief, easily missed, scene of the Mongolian mobile home, a Ger, the Mongolian version of the yurt, sitting on top a flat bed wooden wagon being pulled over the wide open steppe by horses.

Next time someone obnoxious waves a new new thing in our faces, we'll try to remember the mobile home and comment accordingly.

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