"I know that my predictions and ideas are looked upon with horror by Parisian intellectuals, the same people who did not foresee the fall of Communism, who believe that the peaceful ‘assimilation’ of immigrants is possible, who expatiate all page long on abstruse questions, who drone out truisms on ‘democracy’ and pious asininities on the ‘republic’. I am not backing down, however: war is coming and announcing itself with unheard-of violence: war in the streets, civil war, widespread terrorist war, a generalised conflict with Islam and, very probably, nuclear conflicts. This will probably be the face of the first half of the Twenty-first century. And we have never been less prepared: invaded, devirilised, physically and morally disarmed, the prey of a culture of meaninglessness and masochistic culpability. Europeans have never in their history been as weak as at this very moment when the Great Threat appears on the horizon."