Only Tribes held together by a group feeling can survive in a desert. (Ibn Khaldun, 14th century Arab historian)
Time to chuck into the dustbin the cosmopolitan notions so celebrated at global conferences: a world run by wise men of the United Nations, science-driven socialists or their ostensibly more pragmatic twins, global free marketers. We are leaving the age of abstractions and entering one dominated by deep-seated ethnic, religious and cultural loyalties, some with roots from centuries and millennia ago.
The 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun noted that what most holds people together is biology and shared history. These create the critical bonds of kinship and trust and a sense of common purpose that have animated every ascendant group from the days of the Greeks and Romans through the British empire, America and modern day China.
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