Programming the peasants – Conscription is the logical next tool for a state that has run out of easier ones
Fri 4:30 pm +00:00, 23 Oct 2026
Source, halfway down here: https://internationalman.com/articles/riots-in-the-streets-repression-in-the-markets-europes-collapse-enters-its-next-phase/
Most of Western Europe runs structural deficits it has no political mechanism to close, which incidentally is why they’re going to war.
France hasn’t balanced a budget in half a century and is now fighting over pension reform its own street can veto. Italy carries debt north of 130% of GDP into a demographic profile that guarantees the ratio gets worse. Germany, the supposed fiscal hawk, has binned its debt brake in all but name to fund rearmament and industrial subsidies it can’t pay for any other way… so war is the answer.
Sure, we told you all this years ago, but now it’s happening, and it’s showing up exactly where you’d expect: the term premium on long-dated Bunds and gilts, the widening spread between core and periphery paper, and foreign central banks increasingly reluctant to hold the stuff at all.
When your marginal buyer becomes your own central bank, you’ve just moved the problem onto a balance sheet that has to print to close the gap.
From here it’s financial repression, same as every over-indebted sovereign since the invention of paper money. Push real yields negative, force domestic institutions (pension funds, insurers, banks via capital rules) to hold the debt whatever it returns, and inflate the liabilities away while telling the public the money illusion is prosperity.
Germany is the big one.
For 70 years the German export machine made the rest of the European project solvent-adjacent. Cheap Russian gas, cheap Chinese demand, and an undervalued currency (courtesy of sharing one with Greece) let German manufacturers run surpluses that financed everyone else’s deficits. All three legs of that stool are gone. Energy costs several multiples of what US or Gulf competitors pay. The Chinese have moved up the value chain and now compete head-on in autos, machine tools and chemicals instead of buying German kit.
You can see it in the closures: chemical plants idled or relocated, automakers cutting shifts and moving capacity to the US and China, energy-intensive industry leaving for good instead of waiting for a cheaper grid that isn’t coming. Europe priced itself out the moment it decided to kill reliable baseload power faster than it could build the replacement. And once the capital, the supply chains, and the skilled workers leave, they don’t come back on a four-year political cycle.
A Germany without its industrial surplus is simply a much bigger version of the fiscal problem the rest of the eurozone already has.
Then there’s the liability side that can’t be voted away, because every European welfare state was built on a population pyramid that no longer exists. EU fertility has sat well below the 2.1 replacement rate for a generation (closer to 1.4 to 1.5 across most of the core, lower still in parts of the south and east). And that only compounds. Fewer workers paying in, more retirees drawing out, and a state that raises the retirement age by increments too small to matter and taxes by increments too large to ignore.
Immigration was the policy answer. It’s partly offset the raw numbers and created a second, harder problem: large-scale, low-integration migration is now one of the defining political fractures on the continent — the Netherlands, Germany, France.
A welfare state designed around a homogeneous, high-participation workforce doesn’t translate to a different demographic mix without much higher growth or much lower benefits per head. Europe has produced neither, so the gap gets papered over with more debt. Add pensions that are mostly unfunded pay-as-you-go promises, and you’ve got a continent that has already spent money it doesn’t have and increasingly can’t generate.
Speaking of which… Britain.
If Europe is a slow puncture, the UK decided to test how fast the tire could deflate. Every problem above — an ageing population, a shrinking industrial base, some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world — plus a stack of self-inflicted wounds all its own.
Gilt yields have spent years telling the political class something it refuses to hear: the market no longer gives Britain the benefit of the doubt.
Debt-to-GDP is above 100% for the first time since the early 1960s, and this time there’s no post-war growth boom coming to grow it away. The Bank of England is trying to fight inflation while managing a debt-service bill that rises every time it does its job.
The North Sea, once Britain’s fiscal cushion, is a declining, heavily taxed basin. Deindustrialisation is running the same way as in Germany, but with a smaller, less diversified economy to absorb it. The NHS eats an ever-larger share of a shrinking budget and delivers less for the marginal pound than it did a decade ago. Net migration is running at levels that would have been a political earthquake 20 years ago and now barely lasts a news cycle. And because a growing population with flat per-capita output shows up as growth in the headline number, the stagnation everyone actually lives with never makes the statistics.
Sterling’s reserve-adjacent status is the last asset Britain has left to spend, and it’s been drawn on heavily. A currency crisis in a G7 nation was supposed to be unthinkable. The 2022 gilt crisis should have ended that idea for good. It was a preview.
Now, read these two together, because they landed in the same news cycle and neither makes sense without the other.
First, UK Chief of the Defence Staff Richard Knighton, on the record: Russia is a threat to Britain and “our sons and daughters must be ready to fight.” More dangerous, he said, than at any point in his career.
Second, within hours: the Express, the Daily Star, the Mirror and Yorkshire Live, each running a near-identical story on what happens to a Briton who refuses conscription, each citing “severe” penalties, each hung on a former NATO commander’s warning that the Middle East conflict could spiral into global war.
Multiple news desks ran the same story, the same angle, and the same word — “severe” — on the same day. Coincidence? Yeah, right.
This is what coordinated messaging looks like when a state needs a population to accept, in advance, an outcome it has never been asked to vote on but which has already been decided.
A credible official raises the threat level. A compliant press runs the penalties-for-refusal angle before the policy even exists. The public gets used to conscription as thinkable, then plausible, then expected, without a single vote cast.
Programming the peasants.
Conscription is the logical next tool for a state that has run out of easier ones.
We’ve just been through why Britain and its neighbours can’t fund their promises through growth or taxes, and are turning to financial repression to close the gap on capital. Conscription is the same logic applied to labour: when a state can’t buy what it needs at a price the public will tolerate, it compels it.
Historically, monetary repression and conscription turn up together, because they come from the same place — a state that has exhausted its ordinary means.
