One contemplates the latest fashion sweeping the salons of Brussels and the chancelleries of Europe—the quiet, creeping return of conscription—with the same enthusiasm one reserves for a letter from the taxman announcing a retrospective audit. It arrives disguised as "voluntary service," "needs-based registration," or "incentivised national duty," but we all know what it is: the backdoor draft, slipped in while we were distracted by the latest diversity initiative or climate directive.
Look at the map. Latvia has already hauled young men back into uniform. Croatia is polishing the boots for a compulsory two-month stint starting next year. Sweden, that paragon of Nordic sensibility, selects its conscripts with the impartiality of a lottery. Denmark has extended the pleasure to women, because equality, darling. Germany, having suspended the practice in 2011 with the airy confidence of a man who believes wars are things that happen to other people, now mandates questionnaires for every eighteen-year-old male, with the polite threat that if volunteers prove insufficient, compulsion will follow as night follows day. France, under the guidance of President Macron—who appears to view foreign policy as a form of performance art—has announced a voluntary youth service, but one suspects the voluntarism will prove as durable as a New Year's resolution.
And why this sudden enthusiasm for turning the flower of European youth into target practice? Ostensibly, the Russian bear is at the gates, growling about NATO's eastward promenade. Fair enough; Moscow has never been renowned for its sense of humour about encirclement. But let us be honest: the real architects of this martial revival sit not in the Kremlin but in the glass palaces of Brussels and the think-tanks of Paris (or what remains of it). Globalist organisations—NATO, the EU, the whole alphabet soup of supranational busybodies—have decided that Europe must prepare for a war nobody particularly wants, against an enemy who has shown as much desire to invade the Baltic states or Poland as Katie Price has to end up on a PAYE register.
The plan, whispered in the corridors, is brutally simple: send the native European male to the front in sufficient numbers to depopulate him demographically. While he is busy holding some frozen trench outside Kharkiv, the borders remain open to the great replacement project: millions from the Third World, invited in on the assumption that they will prove more compliant, less likely to object when the next tranche of sovereignty is surrendered to Brussels or the next tax hike is imposed to fund green windmills. One is reminded of the Ottoman devshirme, that charming system whereby Christian boys were seized, converted, and turned into Janissaries to guard an empire that despised their origins followed by replacement by peoples who have no historical stake in the cathedrals, the constitutions, or the culture they inherit. History rhymes, as they say, though this time the sultans wear suits from Savile Row and speak in the soothing cadences of human rights rhetoric.
This is the final proof—if proof were needed—that globalism, corporatism, communism, and socialism have failed spectacularly. Globalism promised peace through interdependence; it has delivered interdependence upon adversaries. Corporatism assured us that markets would tame nations; instead, nations are being dissolved to serve markets. Communism, in its lingering academic form, preached equality; it has produced only new hierarchies of the virtuous and the deplorable. Socialism vowed prosperity through redistribution; it has redistributed prosperity to consultants, NGOs, and arms manufacturers while the native working class foots the bill and, soon, provides the bodies.
The failure is total. Economies stagnate under regulation. Cultures dissolve under mandated diversity. Young men, taxed into childlessness and shamed into silence, are now to be conscripted into futility. And for what? To defend a Europe that no longer believes in itself, that apologises for its past while importing its future. The centre-right has been little better, but at least some fragments of it still remember what a nation is for. Throw the rascals out, every last one who speaks of "European values" while eroding the very peoples who created them.
It is not too late. Look again at Bulgaria and Lithuania, where this very month the people have risen—not with pitchforks, but with the quiet, massive dignity of citizens who have simply had enough. They have toppled a government over corruption and a ruinous budget, reminding the continent that sovereignty begins at home. If they can do it, so can we. Before the call-up papers are printed. Before the next generation is sacrificed on the altar of a failed ideology.
And finally, a word—if one may descend to the gutter—for Sir Keir Starmer, that spineless, sanctimonious little apparatchik whose leadership qualities combine the backbone of a slug with the moral grandeur of a parking warden issuing tickets during a funeral. Should this pathetic, quivering nonentity dare to follow the continental trend and smuggle conscription back in through some characteristically cowardly British loophole—perhaps a “voluntary national resilience programme” backed by ruinous fines and prison threats—one can forecast the outcome with absolute certainty.
The country will erupt. Not with the usual crusty anarchists or paid agitators, but with millions of ordinary, long-suffering citizens who have finally run out of cheeks to turn. Rebellion on a scale that will make the poll tax riots look like a particularly spirited Morris dance. And where will our brave Knight of the Realm be then? Cowering in whatever reinforced bunker the civil service has prepared for him, whimpering into his herbal tea, issuing recorded statements about “tough but necessary decisions” while the realm he has so diligently undermined goes up in flames above his head.
One can be equally certain that the 'new arrivals'—his pampered, untouchable clientele—will be granted blanket exemptions, at worst recruited and deployed as his own personal Delta Force, because the entire point of the exercise is to cull the native stock and spare the designated replacements. Watching the demographic ledger tilt ever further in the direction he desires would, one suspects, afford Sir Keir a private, shameful frisson—something perilously close to self-pleasurable satisfaction for a man whose emotional range otherwise runs from pious to smug.
Take heed, you wretched, treacherous little man. Even contemptible weaklings like you can be dragged into the light when a patient people finally lose theirs.
It wont be long now.