Afrasianet - Hossam Shaker - Some verbal slips can raise suspicion of convictions hidden in the heads of their owners. This is what happened, for example, when French President Emmanuel Macron made a passing statement that embarrassed the Elysée, which issued a remedy for it.
Macron's statement came at a meeting of his cabinet on May 24, 2023, and he said at the time, in the context of his comment on a stabbing crime, that France was witnessing a "process of decivilization" (Un processus de décivilisation), the Elysée issued a clarification to disavow the embarrassing suspicion of association with the most popular racist conspiracy theory.
Paris officially threw Macron's problematic statement out the window, but the shipped ferry returned through the wide gate on the other side of the Atlantic.
It is the new US National Security Strategy (2025) that has caused reverberations around the world, and it clearly states that Europe is on the verge of a possible "civilizational erasure", while linking this to immigration and demographic changes that may not make a "European Europe" as it is stated.
The suspicion of adopting conspiracy theories is reinforced by the current US administration's rhetoric in some files, and some of this has been included in the new National Security Strategy document, which denies climate change and considers it merely an "ideology".
Promoting "European Greatness"
The new US national security strategy prioritizes "promoting European greatness," and if this term has become palatable in Washington, D.C., it recalls in some European capitals a gloomy shadow of its dark past, as these expressions were popular in the defunct fascist regimes that turned the continent into ashes and ruins. It seems understandable that Berlin is precisely the first sign of discomfort with this new strategy after its publication.
In the context of promoting "European greatness," the strategic document states that Europe is witnessing "a real and clearer possibility of the erasure of civilization," and that the continent "will become indistinguishable in twenty years or less." In its strategy, the US administration declares that it "wants Europe to remain European and to regain its civilizational self-confidence".
A few days after the document was published, Donald Trump appeared true to its contents in a televised interview with Politico, and resumed his familiar attack on London's Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, who appears to be one of Europe's undesirable faces by Trump's logic.
In 2001, Valacci published her book La rabbia e l'orgoglio (La rabbia e l'orgoglio), in which she presented inflammatory anti-Muslim theses in the form of a conspiracy theory claiming that they were adopting the method of "demographic control" over the West.
Background to the saying "erasing civilization"
Despite the global buzz created by the contents of the new US National Security Strategy, the European phrase of "erasing civilization" did not receive serious attention in the early days of the document's release, despite its association with popular racist conspiracy theories and a host of related ideological ideas and perceptions.
Would the French writer Renaud Camus have probably imagined that the term "La Grande Déculturation" or "Décivilisation" would one day creep into U.S. national security strategy?
Camus coined the term in the context of a conspiracy theory he developed called "Le Grand Remplacement," which he addressed in successive books beginning in 2010.
What makes this thesis a conspiracy theory is certainly not limited to exaggerating the concerns of alleged demographic indicators that have been woven into intimidation by certain demographic components of a historically new character in Europe; it suggests the existence of a hidden power that is carrying out a certain conspiracy in this direction.
This theory did not arise out of thin air, as it was the culmination of a series of racist conspiracy theories and extremist ideological fantasies that have coalesced in recent decades and have inspired political and civic circles across Europe and the Western world, and have become a catalyst for political forces, mass groups, media platforms, and online platforms, as well as for the perpetrators of racially motivated terrorist attacks.
This theory has done its work on the heads of the perpetrators of the most famous massacres and racist assaults in Western countries, including the massacre in Norway (2011) and the massacre in New Zealand (2019).
Since the beginning of the 21st century, several terms have accumulated such as "the Arabization of Europe" or "its Islamization", as mentioned in the works of the veteran Italian writer and journalist Oriana Vallaci, and the writer Giselle Uribe, later named Giselle Littman, who continued to write under the pseudonym "Bat Yaor", meaning "Daughter of the Nile", considering that she was born into an Egyptian Jewish family.
Ironically, Oriana Vallaci's biography has shifted sharply from a traditional left-wing activist to a far-right anti-Muslim outlet, using the events of September 11, 2001 to justify it.
In 2001, Valacci published her book La rabbia e l'orgoglio (La rabbia e l'orgoglio), in which she presented inflammatory anti-Muslim theses in the form of a conspiracy theory claiming that they were adopting a method of "demographic domination" over the West.
The book was a staggering hit, especially with its publication shortly after the September 11 attacks, with its original Italian edition selling more than 700,000 copies in just two weeks. In later years, Oriana Valacci escalated her conspiracy rhetoric, releasing in 2004 La forza della ragione, which focused on the claim of "Islamization of Europe through the demographic factor," and the term "Islamization" here refers to a targeted program or an organized process.
Falacci committed to this drift until her death in 2006, and even considered that "Europe" – a Europe – a Europe – was not a future – it already existed, or, as she put it: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is now Europe, an Islamic colony," as she told the Wall Street Journal in 2005.
The National Security Document states that the United States "We want Europe to remain European" and "regain its civilized self-confidence."
Gisele Littman came out in 2005 with her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, in which she claimed that Europe had surrendered to Islam. Based on Littman's writings, the term "Eurabia," or "Europe" in some translations, has evolved to constitute a popular conspiracy theory among right-wing extremists, anti-Muslims, and anti-cultural opponents in Europe, and these conspiracy theories have also been promoted as propaganda platforms in support of the Israeli occupation.
Following these actions, it has become common since the mid-2000s for mass banners to appear in racist incitement rallies under the banners opposing what they call "the Islamization of Europe" or warning against this so-called "Europe", and then these contents spread through networks and social networking sites, and they became multilingual platforms specialized in injecting racist and inflammatory content imbued with conspiracy obsessions.
Racist conspiracy theories have sparked terrorist violence at some stations, as was the case with the Norwegian Anders Breivik, who carried out a bombing in the heart of the Norwegian capital Oslo and then a horrific massacre that killed 69 people at a youth youth camp on July 22, 2011.
Breivik wrote a book of 1,500 pages in which he preached his inflammatory ideas against those with an immigration background, but what he said was a compilation of published inflammatory ideas, so he used terms such as "Eurabia" in his book, stating, for example, that his goal was to "prevent the cultural suicide of the European continent."
Such incidents reveal aspects of the bloody and destructive effect of racist and inflammatory conspiracy theories in reality, even if their broader destructive impact extends to adherence to the principles and values in the communities, societies and regimes infested with them.
These conspiratorial ideas, in addition to Breivik's own practical model, inspired other perpetrators of attacks who have resorted to emulating the Norwegian precedent in terms of principles, slogans, and visual executions, as demonstrated in the Christchurch massacre against mosque-goers in New Zealand on March 15, 2019, and in another series of bloody attacks in the European depths.
Categories of "civilized suicide"
In the vicinity of this racist ideology, works appeared in European countries that were very popular, which focused on arousing people's fear that their countries were "committing civilizational suicide" due to the presence of certain components of society calculated against the background of immigration.
The trick of these works is based on the idea that societal diversity represents a "suicide," a "decline," a "fall," an "invasion," or a tragic end that undermines the nation's identity, civilization, and culture, especially in view of immigration from the Arab and Muslim worlds and the countries of the Global South in general.
The plot of the panicists is that when they portray reality in such a tragic way, they incite the panicked public to abandon the "luxury" of values, principles, and moral commitments as long as it is a presumed struggle of existence.
Among the headlines that have hit the screens of European bookstores over the past two decades is Tillo Sarazen's Deutschland schafft sich ab, which caused a sensation when it was published in 2010.
The book topped the bestseller lists in Germany within two years of its first edition, selling 1.5 million copies at the time, and became the subject of a long controversy.
Sarazen's book appeared four years after the book was published: "Hey, We Give Up!" (Hurra, wir kapitulieren!) by the German writer Henrik Brüder, an anti-Muslim and cultural diversity writer, in which he claimed that "Europe is subjugated" by those he described as Islamists. The book, published in 2006, was a huge seller and sparked a wide debate about its claims.
Le suicide français appeared on the banks of the Seine in 2014, and hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in just a few months. The author of this book is none other than Eric Zemmour, who is one of the most prominent promoters of Renault Camus's theory of the "Great Replacement" in the French political and media circle.
In his writings, television appearances, and political stances, Zemmour's overwhelming populism, a deep-rooted hatred of diversity, and an outright hostility to Muslims in particular, in addition to being an anti-immigration to France, even though he comes from a Jewish family that emigrated from Algeria.
Zemmour's "Reclaim" party, meaning the restoration of France and its identity, inspired by the racist ideology of the "Great Replacement" , then the racist politician ran in the French presidential elections in 2022 under slogans that exude hatred and incitement.
It is worth noting that some of the statements presented in the European political milieu, which is calculated on moderation, are charged with conspiratorial connotations that make them not stray far from the aforementioned package of theories and theses.
Within this category appears the saying "political Islam", which European governments and parties adopt as a warning against and make it a prelude to policies and procedures within Europe, including an accusation that it is constantly seeking to "control" the country, "Islamize" it, and undermine its culture, and that it is deceiving by showing acceptance of democracy and openness to public order in order to "penetrate".
It is worth pondering that the conspiratorial logic with which the term "political Islam" is charged in Europe applies mainly to mosques, associations, kindergartens, dress choices and cultural manifestations, in the sense that it is liable to affect the Muslim component in general and label it as conspiracy to "Islamize the country" and "threaten democracy", support "separatism" and establish "parallel societies".
Demographic pessimists
The aforementioned works exude a pessimism lurking in the minds of a spectrum of European and Western elites about the consequences of the demographic shifts coming across the southern Mediterranean, and pessimism is also rearing its head from the new US national security document.
One of the earliest expressions of this pessimism was the novelist Jean Raspel in his novel Le Camp des Saints (1973), which was published in French in 1973 and then translated into several languages.
The story goes that an imaginary situation motivated Raspel to weave his novel, when pessimism overwhelmed him in a moment of reflection while he was on the French Riviera in 1971. It came to pass that imagination swept him away that day as he looked towards the distant horizon in the Mediterranean Sea and was prepared to see that the waves were carrying strangers to him, so the talk of the soul raised a question for him: What if they came to us from the world of the South?
The fictional novel revolves around the collapse of European and Western civilization under the influence of massive migration from the Third World to France and the Western world. Decades after its first edition, the literary work has become an exceptional late, and in some seasons of the 21st century, it has even climbed into the best-seller list, and its translations have been celebrated by right-wing extremists and anti-Muslims in European and Western countries, and it seems that the novel inspired conspiracy theories related to its subject.
The proponents of fertile conspiratorial fantasies have pushed their books, novels, and contents of their pleadings year after year, along the lines of "Islamization of Europe" , "Europa", and "The Great Replacement", although these terms do not explicitly result in themselves.
These claims have appeared in the works of France's most prominent literary names, as evidenced by the novel "Soumission" by the leading French novelist Michel Welbeck, published in early 2015.
His novel honestly expressed fantasies of civilizational suicide and alleged cultural subservience to Muslims, as he weaved its events around a Muslim candidate, an imaginary character named "Muhammad bin Abbas" who leads a party that the novelist called "Islamic Brotherhood", and that he won the French presidential elections in 2022, so he began the "Islamization of France", turned the ancient Sorbonne into an "Islamic university", forced its professors to convert to Islam or dismiss from the profession, popularized polygamy, and obliged women to cover their hair and stay at home or leave the country, while The Jews of France were forced to emigrate to occupied Palestine.
It is no wonder that Eric Zemmour celebrates this novel, which represents a clever literary formulation of his crude racist theses. However, Welbeck, who is known for his nihilism, did not only weave inflammatory narratives, he made a series of anti-Muslim statements accusing the "West" of weakness and subservience in the face of Islam, and he said that "Muslim immigrants are the cause of problems and crises" in France, and that "The desire of the native French, it is said, is not for Muslims to integrate, but to stop stealing and attacking them, otherwise there is another solution to leave," he said during an interview conducted by the magazine "Frône Populaire" and published in video episodes starting January 25, 2023.
The dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that Michel Welbeck is one of the recipients of the choir of government and the platforms of culture and media in France, and that President Macron on April 18, 2019, awarded him the highest decoration awarded by the Republic, the "Legion d'Honneur" or "Legion of Honor", and praised his works in a speech he delivered at the ceremony held at the Elysee Palace in the presence of senior statesmen, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy.
It is worth noting that when Sarkozy was interior minister, he called immigration-oriented young people "scum" (2005) in the context of a populist contest for the presidency that he was already able to achieve, and ironically, he ended up in prison 20 years after his statement.
The warm welcome to Michel Welbeck and his followers gives a sober impression that pessimistic theses about cultural diversity, to the extent of concocting conspiracy theories, are not seriously resisted at the levels of the political elite, and may have taken root in the minds and consciences of some political elites, as may be understood by Macron's embarrassing statement in 2023 in which he stated that France is undergoing a "process of deciviation."
However, these theses, or those that are complicit with or reinforce them, have also appeared in the intellectual and academic milieu, and not only on its margins, as may be believed. For example, the dissertation of the prominent American political scientist Samuel Huntington during the 1990s is "Clash of Civilizations," which he initially presented at the American Enterprise Institute, which is close to the "neoconservatives."
This dissertation provided opportunities for interpretation, employment, and inspiration in conflicting tendencies invoking civilization, culture, or religion based on an arbitrary division of the world proposed by Huntington on closed civilizational, cultural, and religious grounds.
Bernard Lewis joined the rhetoric of warning against the cultural diversity and Muslim demography of Europe, not only because of his Western-centric orientalist rhetoric and his prejudiced stance on Islam and Muslim cultures, but also because of his embrace of the idea that Europe's Muslim minorities will inevitably become majorities, that they are not fit to integrate into these environments, and that Europe will become Islamic by the end of the 21st century, as he stated in an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt, published on April 19, 2006.
The Zionist-leaning American historian Walter Ze'ev LaCure has been involved in the chorus of the demographic factor related to Muslims in the context of his theorizing of the decline of Europe, for example, in his 2007 book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.
The "cultural " discourse and its "demographic" counterpart, which invokes demographic indicators, seem to be involved in fueling the conspiratorial imagination, as is sometimes expressed by prominent politicians, including the President of the Czech Republic, Miloš Zeman, who in his Christmas speech in 2015 described the refugee movement at the time as an "organized invasion," and then went on to weave a specific conspiracy theory in a radio interview a few days later (January 4, 2016): "I believe that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that organized this invasion with material funding from a group of countries," and that the group does not have the power to wage war against Europe, so it "resorted to other means, such as the wave of immigration, to gradually rule Europe."
This baseless allegation provides a pretext for a hard-line policy in the Czech Republic and other Central European countries that have stubbornly refused to accept any Muslim asylum-seekers and have not hesitated to accept large numbers of Ukrainian refugees.
U.S. action under the new strategy
What the US National Security Strategy has argued in this regard is not isolated words, as it represents a theoretical framework that explains the concerted positions and statements issued by the faces of the current US administration, led by Trump himself.
The Strategic Document's assessment in this regard is not only relevant to Europe, but rather to the United States itself, whose administration is engaged in a vicious campaign against migrants and irregular residents.
Viewing immigrants from the Global South as a civilizational threat is at odds with Trump's blatant contempt for the Somali presence in the United States ahead of the release of the strategy document, which went so far as to dehumanize Somalis.
The new national security document also provides a systematic explanation of the US president's scattered positions and statements, such as Donald Trump's successive expressions of attack and contempt for London's Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as his fierce attack on Zahran Mamdani ahead of his strong win as mayor of New York.
The national security strategy's reliance on a racist conspiracy theory, or at least keeping up with its conclusions, seems to be a theoretical framework for a clear trend in the new American era that seeks to strengthen the position of the far political right, populism, and racist tendencies in European environments.
The document heralds the rise of far-right forces and far-right parties and groups across Europe, stating, for example, that "the growing influence of European national parties is a cause for great optimism."
The strategy criticizes what it describes as a restriction on "true democracy" and freedom of expression in Europe, "the undermining of democratic processes" by these governments, and that they are "unstable minority governments, many of which trample on the basic principles of dissent."
The new U.S. National Security Strategy adopts a clear orientation to influence the domestic political maps of European countries to strengthen the influence of the far right and far-right populist currents, and to enhance its chances of ascension to power across the continent. One of the priorities of U.S. policy toward Europe is "to develop resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European countries."
The strategy document frames successive positions issued by the administration, such as the meeting held by US Vice President J.D. Vance in February 2025 ahead of the German general election with Alice Faidl, the leader of the far-right Alternative party in the Federal Republic. The meeting broke through a taboo or a firm "taboo" and seemed to express a new America that does not hesitate to manipulate the internal arena of its allies.
The document stimulates the revival of the national identities of European countries at the expense of the European Union, which the document ignores as a potential partner, and mentions it only in a negative light.
The new national security strategy leaves no room for hesitation that the new America is embracing the far-right rhetoric in its core files: immigration, identity, crime, and cultural diversity, and is disgusted with its oversimplified conceptual apparatus, so much so that the document identifies among the major issues facing Europe "immigration policies that change the face of the continent and provoke conflicts."
This should come as no surprise anyway, as Trump has been known for his close links with right-wing and populist figures in Britain, such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, as well as with far-right European leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Elon Musk, a staunch supporter of Trump and then a defector from him, has also stood out in this context, as was the case with the radical anti-immigration march organized by racist activist Tommy Robinson on September 13, 2025, where Musk gave an interview with him online that included warnings about the reality of "civilization's fragility", and how official policies in Britain are "destroying the country", and went so far as to incite the public "Whether you choose violence or not, violence will come to you. Either you fight or you die, that's the truth."
Musk has previously provided an exceptional appearance for AfD leader Alice Fidel when he hosted her to a standing ovation on his X platform as part of her campaign for the last German election (2025). Musk's posts steadily slide into far-right rhetoric at its farst, and you can trace phrases in his words and posts that give the impression that they are inspired by white supremacist conspiracy theories.
Racist ideology in a new dress
It is indispensable to appreciate the seriousness of some of the contents by evoking the historical context, because since the middle of the twentieth century, racist tendencies have no longer been able to express themselves in the traditional ways that were previously customary and using the genealogical and chromatic logic, which forces their new presence in the political or media sphere "mainstream" or in the space of the international community, to be covered with suggestive statements, symbolic expressions, and knitted formulations.
The new racist and supremacist tendencies choose to wrap themselves in carefully selected formulations in a time bounded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants, international humanitarian law, a package of international, regional and national charters, constitutions, declarations, and many slogans of rights and freedoms proclaimed around the world.
After World War II, the world declared the renunciation of traditional racial and color racisms, while international bodies, UN organizations, and mechanisms for monitoring, tracking, and investigating these charters and principled statements were operating in the space. These developments have limited the opportunities to disclose racist, hateful, and incitement tendencies compared to the time of outstretched arms in the squares, fascist discourses raging on platforms, and the parades of militarization and mobilization that are typical of the "black and white" era.
It is no wonder that some discourses of racism and incitement today find their trick in hiding behind misleading terms, symbolic vocabulary, and woven sayings such as "deciviation," because they store a semantic baggage that obviates the naïve disclosure of traditional racist content.
Moreover, it deliberately inflames panic about the transformations of culture, society, and demography, sounding the alarm about "imminent decline", "civilizational suicide", "cultural subjugation" and "too late" in order to justify, in the tone of existential intimidation, the vicious campaign to destroy some of the values and principles and the requirements of the harsh charters and constitutions.
This raises a logical question about how far the American leadership would have gone if it had existed in the time of the rise of defunct fascisms, and what would its explicit slogans, policies, programs, positions, and statements look like then, which emerge with spectacular slides even in a time fraught with charter restraints and fenced off by institutional, value, and ethical controls?!
The indispensable conclusion remains that civilizational suicide and cultural decline are indeed predictable, but through a different approach, this is the inevitable fate of the reckless impulses that destroy human and moral values, principles and slogans, and continue to overthrow conventions and international law, in addition to their involvement in attributing and covering up a live-broadcast genocide, seeking excuses for it, and punishing international justice bodies that dare to investigate it.
In other words, the "new America" and any of the Western nations will commit suicide culturally if they submit to the racist obsession and are led to its program under the headings: "The Great Return Again." The people may slide into an abyss devoid of values and principles, even if they remain at the forefront of military power and strategic immunity, as the new national security document hopes.