Winter 2023—Interminable: Remembering A Seemingly Endless Battle Of The First World War And Pondering The Seemingly Endless Struggle Against The Soft Dictatorship Of “Expert Elites”

Remembering The Battle Of Verdun

December 18th of 2022 marked the 106th anniversary of the end of the First World War’s Battle of Verdun. The Battle of Verdun commenced on the morning of February 21st, 1916 and lasted for a further 10 months into December of the same year, making Verdun the longest battle of World War I. Apart from its extensive length, however, the Battle of Verdun eventually obtained a legendary reputation for itself that far outweighed actual strategic considerations of the battlefield involved, the political implications of the battle’s aftermath, or even its larger impact upon the course of the war itself. In the years following the First World War, Verdun somehow achieved a mythic status that other and far more destructive, dramatic, and strategically important battles never did. The battle was fought exclusively between the French and Germans; the British had no direct involvement whatsoever, and the battle was over long before the Americans declared war on Germany. For the French, Verdun became the country’s final great military victory of the twentieth century. During the abysmal years of French moral and patriotic decay in the 1930s and 1940s, Verdun remained as a mythic reminder of the “good old days” of French martial strength and national unity in the great and glorious cause of defending the homeland. After 1945, with the painfully slow dismemberment of the worldwide French colonial network, Verdun’s role as a symbolic marker of past French military pride and patriotism only increased for the more conservative portions of France’s population. For the Germans too, Verdun became an important part of their internal narrative of noble tragedy in a war that was won by the gallantry of the common soldiers who served in the armies, but lost by the foolishness or treachery of the government, the bureaucracy, the high command, and the home front. As for British and American historians, Verdun came to represent a different kind of symbolism. As it was the longest running battle of the First World War, Verdun symbolized the technocratic monstrosities of modern and industrialized warfare, in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers could be mindlessly sacrificed in the bloody slaughterhouse of unending and pointless battles of attrition and annihilation. For many British and American historians, Verdun is the epitome of World War I’s harsh and tragically meaningless stamp upon the history of warfare, with modernity marking the end of chivalry and glory on the battlefield. In this way, Verdun helped paint the picture in the 1920s of the Western world’s total disenchantment with war as a means of pursuing national policy; it remained as the most graphic reminder to the post-war generation that avoiding a second world war was something that had to be secured at any and all costs.

Earlier this year, I read a book about the battle written by Paul Jankowski, a professor of history at Brandeis University. Verdun: The Longest Battle Of The Great War was Professor Jankowski’s attempt to answer the following question: how does the legacy of Verdun compare with the realities of the battle itself? Verdun: The Longest Battle Of The Great War was written in a manner that combined the military history approach popular before the 1980s with the social and cultural historical approaches more popular in recent decades. In writing Verdun, Jankowski claimed a “total” approach to chronicling this battle that, for many, holds a meaning that goes above and beyond that of World War I’s totality.

Verdun held very little strategic or even symbolic significance to either the French or Germans. It was only after the battle went on for 300 days did the place gain symbolic significance, as a place representing the centuries-long struggle between Latins and Teutons, the multigenerational ebb and flow of French and German rivalries in the region along the banks of the Meuse River. The Battle of Verdun became the martial representation of national spiritual struggle against age-old enemies for both the French and Germans, but that is certainly not how the battle started out. In fact, historians have long argued about why the Germans chose to attack there in February of 1916; the motives were confusing, at best, and may have been hidden behind a complicated array of strategic reasoning that is now lost to us.

The battle was nearly devoid of sudden heroic shifts or turnings of the tide. It quickly became a struggle in which neither side could ever hope to claim complete victory, but in which withdrawal was considered totally unthinkable. At no stage in the battle were events determined by quick and dramatic moves of daring initiative or explicit tactical brilliance; Verdun was a long, slow, plodding, and apocalyptically fatal force for destruction for both the French and German armies that fought there, a depressing and tragic example of a never-ending battle that fed itself in bloody perpetuity.

For the Germans, the Battle of Verdun became an emblem of cold-bloodedness; for the French, it became an emblem of selfless resolve. Throughout the battle, both sides fell prey to the temptation to believe that sudden, unexpected local offensives or troop surges would quickly and decisively carry the battle, but this always proved to be an illusion. After the first week of fighting, the German advance ground to a halt; for the rest of the battle, action in and around Verdun settled into eight or nine months of varying attacks and defenses by both the Germans and French. The Battle of Verdun ended up proving that when opposing forces are roughly equivalent, fortune usually favors the defender. As much as the Germans wanted the battle to be one of constant movement and flanking maneuvers, the advanced logistics of the time, the improved accuracy and firepower of modern artillery, and the sheer immensity of modern battlefields all made a war of movement all but impossible. Troops could be moved and deployed into position more quickly than any strategist studying earlier wars could’ve comprehended, artillery barrages were more accurate and destructive than anything the brave infantry had ever encountered before, and battlefields that stretched for many tens of miles wide made flanking maneuvers almost pointless. These new disturbing realities did not stop the French from building an epic national defensive myth around the battle’s particulars, nor did they stop the Germans from building their own offensive myths around their soldiers’ efforts to win a battle in which the supposed stupidity of their commanders inevitably doomed them.

World War I was the ultimate conflict in terms of proving that modern defensive firepower had, for the time being, neutralized almost all potential for armies to deliver decisive crushing blows against their enemies, and this left the commanders on both sides grasping for attritional warfare and the “out-killing” of their enemies as their best hope for long-term victory. At the start of the war, French military doctrine had emphasized the importance of offensive infantry operations, supported by light artillery pieces. The German doctrines had emphasized the importance of heavy artillery, and this difference between the two armies is what allowed the Germans to make such slow but steady progress in the first month of the battle; they vastly outclassed the French in heavy artillery. However, as the battle lengthened, and the French slowly changed their tactics, stalemate ensued. The nature of warfare changed greatly at Verdun and reflected the general changes to warfare taking place because of World War I’s newly-evident revelations. Artillery took the starring role for both sides at Verdun; especially for the French, infantry doctrines were altered to treat heavy artillery support as unconditionally necessary. The importance of air superiority also gained prominence at Verdun, and in general, both the French and German armies came to reflect a heavier and heavier reliance upon technology, material, machines, and production capabilities as opposed to the old-fashioned ideas that centered primarily around infantry and cavalry. Even the very organizational structures of the two armies changed: fewer and fewer infantry were deployed as machine-gunners, fighter planes, and heavy artillery grew in importance to strategists and tacticians alike.

Jankowski devoted a chapter to writing about what he called “the nightmare” of Verdun: the written and recorded experiences of the soldiers who fought and struggled and lived and died on the vast battlefields of the area. Common themes emerge in these experiences; along with the usual horrors you’d expect to read about in any of the great battles of World War I, there is also a sense of depressing isolation and mindlessness. Because so much of the Battle of Verdun involved nearly constant artillery exchanges mixed with thousands of small-scale infantry engagements, the terrain and firepower combined to make Verdun a very, very lonely experience for most soldiers. Soldiers moving up to reinforce forward positions did so at night, silently hoping to grope in the dark for where they needed to be. Scattered troop positions were often cut off for days on end from food, from water, from friendly faces. Even the manner of death itself could be a terrifying prospect; many soldiers wrote about the terror they felt at being killed, not by a bullet, but by a stray artillery round somewhere in the dark out in the woods or in a forgotten trench, where their disintegrated bodies would never be identified. The battlefields of Verdun were so vast and the artillery barrages so devastating to the terrain that orders could take many, many hours to reach disconnected units, even when such units might’ve actually been close to each other.

For so many people in France and Germany, Verdun came to be the battle that emblemized what the World War I experience was all about. For many soldiers, Verdun was the most intense and terrifying experience they ever had with prolonged, modern artillery dueling. But is it fair to place Verdun above all other battles of the war in its singular savagery? The author of the book I read feels that, factually speaking, it is not. However, what made Verdun so useful as an emblem of the war’s horrors for so many people on both sides of the conflict was its length. More people died in 1916 in the Battle of the Somme, but whereas that conflict only lasted about five months, Verdun lasted for ten. Verdun achieved its top place in the pantheon of First World War battles because of its length and its seemingly never-ending pointlessness. As for the soldiers who fought at Verdun on both sides, they were multidimensional in their connections and attachments and relationships; they were not singularly motivated by either chauvinism or pacifism, but by a complex web of combined feelings, motivations, and inspirations that could manifest in different ways depending on the situation in any given moment. At the closing of the book’s epilogue, Professor Jankowski wrote that “at Verdun French and German men and their machines fought each other according to the logic and the conventions of the day, without either sinister design or noble purpose, bred by nation-states that enjoyed unprecedented powers over them. Most were neither chauvinists nor pacifists. They were journeymen doing their jobs without enthusiasm, so well and so doggedly that they left behind lasting testimony to the destructive capacities of two of the most creative national cultures in history.” Because of reading this book, I can honestly say that I’ve gained a greater respect and reverence for the men who fought in the trenches of World War I, who put up with the worst of the hells of modern warfare for so very long and, in most cases, for so little immediate reward.

The Fight Over Republican Party Leadership Must Result In Leadership That Overcomes The Country's More Pressing Challenges

Did you know that between 2000 and 2019, the number of school district administrators in America’s public education systems went up by 87.6%?

That’s crazy, especially if you consider that during this same period of time, the number of students in those same school systems only increased by 7.6%. As for public school teachers, that number only increased by 8.7%.

By the time you are done reading this post, it is my hope that you will see how this one single set of statistics says almost everything you need to know about what is fundamentally wrong with life and politics in the United States right now.

But in the meantime, and speaking of school administrators…

…earlier this year, on an occasion in which I was attending my professional development meetings in my job as a high school history teacher, my principal approached me and asked for my thoughts about what happened in the House of Representatives during the first week of January. Like some other people I know, my principal was surprised by the gridlock within the Republican Party in the vote for Speaker of the House, and he wanted to know how I felt about Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to reconcile with the approximately 20 conservative Republicans who resisted for so long in voting for him as the Speaker.

Unlike some of my friends on social networking websites like Facebook (some of whom actually work in political campaigns and state legislatures), I did not feel that what happened in the House this January was an embarrassment for the Republican Party. I did not believe, as my liberal friends might want me to, that democracy was once again “under threat” because a group of the most hardline conservative representatives in the House held up McCarthy’s Speakership in order to wrestle political concessions from him. No matter how loudly the news media screamed about how weak and vulnerable the ordeal allegedly made the Republican Party look, I felt very little concern. Allow me to explain to you why I feel the way I do.

It goes back to that set of statistics about school administrators that I shared with you at the beginning of this post.

Life in the United States of America in 2023 is dictated almost completely and exclusively by the “experts” and the “elites” among us. Just take a look at our public school systems to see what I am talking about. Our schools are dictated and controlled almost completely and exclusively by the education bureaucrats, teacher unions, and other officials and organizations falsely claiming to know what’s best for kids and teachers in the classroom. The same sorry state of affairs holds true for many aspects of American life outside of the school systems, and this is especially true of our politics. The “experts” and “elites” of the political class would have you and I believe the lie that the “partisan zealotry” of those 20 conservative Republicans who refused to play ball this January is evidence that the American political order is too divided for “the people’s business” to get done, that “democracy is at risk” of being destroyed by those on the far right wing of the political spectrum who are trying to stand athwart history to yell “STOP!” in the face of supposed progress. Even some Republicans get annoyed when we conservatives say and do things to disrupt politics as usual. These Republicans get upset with us conservatives because our partisanship prevents the rest of the country from moving forward—and generally speaking, ideologically leftward—as it has been doing for the last 15 years.

The truth of the matter is that the Republicans have been relatively useless as an opposition party for so long that we conservatives have lost interest in playing nice or remaining unified with a party that doesn't seem to stand clearly or consistently for anything or to actually stand up against the radical left. I'm not saying that what happened in the House this last January was useful or constructive in and of itself, but I am arguing that I don't think most Americans (especially the ones on the right side of the political spectrum who are busy living their private sector lives) have much faith in the GOP right now. Whereas the “experts” and the “elites” are frustrated with House Republicans right now, I see the events of this January as a shakeup that needed to be had out, one way or another. Republicans need to figure out who our leader is and what we stand for as a party. At the start of January, Kevin McCarthy obviously hadn't done enough to command the undivided loyalty of his fellow Republicans, and I think that's a problem that needed to be worked out no matter how painful or potentially embarrassing it may have felt for some. Working out that problem fell squarely on the shoulders of Kevin McCarthy, and he eventually figured out a way to make things happen. As for the 20 conservatives who opposed him, they played the game of politics and got some of what they wanted, and I’m perfectly fine with that. This is how power is negotiated in the republic handed down to us by our Founding Fathers. And to be perfectly honest, the people who are worried that this affair made the Republican Party look bad are missing the bigger point: the Republican Party was in a bad shape before Kevin McCarthy lost any of his votes to become the Speaker of the House.

I know that the following paragraphs are going to read strangely coming from a guy like me, a guy who regularly posts on Facebook about how irredeemable he believes the Democratic Party to be, a guy who still maintains to this day that the Republican Party is the best major party in American politics right now. No matter how you cut it, the Republican Party is in a state of flux. We should not bemoan that fact, and we should do whatever it takes to take advantage of it. The Republican Party needs to figure out what it stands for, how it intends to champion a message that resounds with Americans who still want to try and save this country from the assaults made upon it day-in and day-out by those on the radical left. We need to lean in and accept the discomfort that comes from vicious primary campaigns and the gravity that is felt in the understanding that politics is the pursuit of power. Wielding power doesn’t always feel good, but when power being wielded is inevitable, it becomes ever more important that the best among us are the ones doing the wielding. I personally feel that the days of looking for leadership from Donald Trump are likely long gone. I also have a sense that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida could and should be part of the Republican Party’s new national look moving forward, and I have a sense that politicians like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell should be cast aside if we wish to have a Republican Party that consistently stands up for what is right. As for figures like Kevin McCarthy, I don’t necessarily have anything outstanding against them. I know my language on Facebook doesn’t always lend itself to this way of thinking, but I really do believe the Republican Party can and should be a big-tent organization that is inclusive of people with a wide range of viewpoints and opinions.

But the Party needs to figure itself out, and it needs to take whatever time is needed to figure itself out, even if some of us get accused of contributing to “gridlock” or of fostering “partisanship” or “zealotry.” I think what happened in the House this week was part of the normal political process, and I don’t think we should wax melodramatic about how many days it took for the Republicans to elect a new Speaker of the House. We’ve got bigger problems to worry about, and when I say “we,” I am referring to the country at large.

I’ll end with how I started this post. We live in a country that is ruled by a soft dictatorship of the “elites,” a patronizing oligarchy of “experts” who attempt every day and in every possible way to micromanage every aspect of Americans’ private lives. I am a school teacher who works in the public school system, and I look at America’s problems from that particular perspective. Public education in the United States has become a political battleground, and the good guys are losing on that battleground. In the early days of the republic, public education used to support parents in their efforts to educate children. Educating children involves some of the most fundamental building blocks of our society. It concerns some of the greatest questions we should all be worried about. Who decides what the children learn? Who decides the place they will have in our society when they grow up? What will their future be determined by? What do we teach our children about their own history, their own sexuality, their own identity? When it comes to answering these questions, I’ve always believed that parents who sacrifice to choose to conceive and raise their own children in traditional family units should be the first in line in deciding such important matters. However, we now live in a society in which the “experts” and the “elites” want to be in charge of those matters. These “experts” and “elites” are often motivated, not by self-sacrifice and traditional family values, but by radical leftism. At the very least, that has now become the dominant culture and context of modern education if not the motivating gospel truth for each and every individual educator.

In America’s schools, most of the money and energy and growth flows to the bureaucracy, to the administrators, to the “experts” who spend more time in board meetings and union negotiations and education seminars and various other events and venues…and less and less time in actual classrooms with actual students. This is not a condemnation of individual administrators who are genuinely accomplishing good in their jobs. This is simply a warning about a top-heavy public school industry that has largely lost sight of what is really most important when it comes to educating our children. Educators are supposed to be dispassionate non-partisans who do not get involved with socially re-engineering society. However, despite the many educators out there who are doing their best to remain above such things, we all know that educators generally advocate and support and contribute to leftist causes far and above what can be found on the other side of the ideological equation. In their worst manifestations, leftist-dominated education systems facilitate the warping of young minds and identities.

Last November, Larry Arnn, who is the president of Hillsdale College, warned us all that public education, which “is as old as our nation,” has lately “adopted the purpose of supplanting the family and controlling parents.” He described much of what I’ve seen on my own while working as a teacher. He bemoaned our children “being turned against their country by being indoctrinated to look on its past—of which all parents, of course, are in some way a part—as a shameful time of irredeemable injustice.” He attested to the horrors I’ve personally witnessed in my own work in the public schools, that we “increasingly have children being encouraged to speak of their sexual proclivities at an age when they can hardly think of them.” And of course, we all know what happens to parents who dare criticize the worst offenses of a leftist educational system: investigation and outright harassment from the agencies of the administrative state, up to and including the FBI.

Larry Arnn posed this question to us: who gets to decide how our children should be raised? He answered: “the choice is between the parents, who have taken the trouble to have and raise the child—and who, in almost all cases, will give their lives to support the child for as long as it takes and longer—or the educational bureaucracy, which is more likely than a parent to look upon the child as an asset in a social engineering project to rearrange government and society.”

I pose a similar question that applies to all aspects of our lives outside of the school systems: when it comes to deciding how Americans should live their private lives and direct their own private sector affairs, who gets to hold the ultimate power?

In the days of its Founding, the United States of America went to war against a British king who “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass [the American] people, and eat out their substance.” Now, in the year 2023, the United States of America has problems that are far more important than the House of Representatives going without a Speaker for a few days. Our own government, led out by the Biden administration, is sending forth bureaucrats of the administrative state to harass the American people and eat out our substance. As I’ve outlined, the “experts” and “elites” are not only seeking to dominate us and dictate every aspect of our public school systems, but in every other sector of society as well. The bureaucracy of the administrative state is choking the life out of what used to be a free country. Once again, Larry Arnn’s warning is instructive on this point: “the political contest between parents and people who make an independent living, on the one hand, and the administrative state and all its mighty forces on the other, is the key political contest of our time.”

When you wonder what it is that we conservatives are striving to conserve, what we are trying to secure in this, the key political contest of our time, the answer is simple: our country’s greatness. This is just the first step towards understanding why someone like Christopher Peterson didn’t get all worked up over Kevin McCarthy requiring a dozen or more votes to become Speaker of the House this January. When we live in a country ruled by bureaucrats in a soft dictatorship of the “expert elite,” and when we live in a country in which fundamental institutions like schools are being reworked and reengineered to supplant other foundational concepts like accountability, civic virtue, dignity, duty, family, formality, gender, hard work, identity, patriotism, resilience, responsibility, reverence, sacrifice, self-reliance, self-restraint, and even sexuality, it really doesn’t ultimately matter who gets to be the Speaker of the House. What it boils down to is this: I don’t care if Kevin McCarthy is or isn’t the Speaker of the House. All I care about is that if he IS going to be Speaker of the House, he needs to understand that he has one job and one job only: to stand athwart the Biden regime’s leftist agenda to yell “STOP!” in the face of Woke progressivism’s unrelenting march towards destroying what is left of our country’s greatness.

--Christopher Peterson, February 28th, 2023