David Brussat om det andre slaget om London (Samt James Kalb som forklaringsmodell for Totenpark-prosjektet)

Tower Bridge.

-Wikimedia.

Det viser seg at London har blitt berget, med nød og neppe, to ganger. Først fra nazistene under 2. verdenskrig, deretter fra modernistene, som hadde langt verre planer for byen enn Hitler. Men så er da også modernisme og fascisme to sider av samme sak. 

Utdrag fra David Brussats artikkel:

- They fought to save London

"The fight against London’s version of Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, which would have destroyed the Marais district of central Paris, came to a head in 1968 with the proposal to raze the Covent Garden district. Jenkins writes:

A militant community association sprang into action. Buildings were squatted, council meetings disrupted, streets occupied and councillors lobbied – or harassed. … The group was publicly supported by a then-radical Evening Standard, and by a wider awareness that a familiar London was being threatened by change more drastic than any inflicted by the blitz. … Despite continued protest through 1972, the Covent Garden plan pressed ahead. But trouble began when its custodian as GLC [Greater London Council] committee chairman, Lady Dartmouth (later Princess Diana’s stepmother, Lady Spencer), rebelled and joined the protesters. More critically, a sympathetic planning minister, Geoffrey Rippon, had his officials secretly list for preservation 250 “historic” buildings dotted across the entire plan area. When this became public, it sabotaged the entire proposal.

In the quote above, Jenkins identifies the nub of the issue in the minds of Londoners, who were justly concerned that “a familiar London was being threatened by change more drastic than any inflicted by the blitz.” Soon after the preservationist gambit described by Jenkins, the Covent Garden plan was withdrawn. Jenkins records a lengthy succession of such projects abandoned, including the Motorway Box, or put on indefinite hold, such as a plan to obliterate Whitehall and 10 Downing St. – the equivalent of the federal district in Washington, D.C. He adds:

Abercrombie was over. The GLC and the London boroughs switched the outlook of their planning policies. They actively promoted the new 1967 Civic Amenities Act, allowing for the designation of conservation areas across Britain’s inner cities. By 1975, 250 such areas of mostly Georgian and Victorian streets had been given protection, including most of Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and much of inner Camden and Islington. The appearance of inner London we see today was largely determined in the immediate aftermath of 1973.

Jenkins adds:

The effect of the revolution was astonishing – and to the best of my knowledge never fully acknowledged.

And:

It is the architecture profession … that should be held responsible for what almost happened to London. We can blame elected politicians for decisions that govern our lives. But in complex decisions like this – as in matters of law, medicine or defence – they are at the mercy of professional experts. Architecture at the time had gone awry, seized by ideological gigantism, dubbed by some critics as an “edifice complex”. But I know of no effort by the profession to reflect on that period in its history, to set the record straight or show what lessons it has learned.

The rational for the postwar reconfiguration of London and other British cities and towns was deeply flawed, and obviously so. But it was not obvious, apparently, to most “experts.” Since then, the dystopian sins of architecture have changed but have not improved, and the experts involved remain as stupendously oblivious today as in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Yet somehow, then as now, the public recognizes the truth in spite of all the propaganda of the planners. In a remark that may be extended to other targeted London districts, Jenkins declares:

What saved Covent Garden from its fate was that the potential victims had enough fire in their bellies to fight back."

Da vi nøt Fish&Chips i Covent Garden, hadde jeg ingen aning om at det var på håret dette ble reddet fra fra Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin.

Hyggelig er det at man har klart å berge noe her i verden, ikke minst Paris og London, fra Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin. Med sorg kan jeg imidlertid melde at alle bygdebyene og bygdene på Toten, har gått tapt til Le Corbusiers visjoner. Toten har blitt en slags bastard mellom Le Corbusier, Norman Borlaug og William Blackstone. Det aller, aller verste fra tre verdener!

Such a view has a number of oddities. One is that it turns the state into an ideological project, so that the value of patriotism depends on the value of the project. If during the Nazi period a German despised the laws of the Third Reich it tells us that he should not have pinned his loyalty to the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven, of learning and craftsmanship, of medieval towns, Baroque churches, and great universities. That would have been evil nationalism, because it would have been a loyalty that “precede[s] and supersede[s] law” to an historical community and its culture. As such, it would have had a strong ethnic and religious component.

What then should he have done? Abandoned all concern for his native country and its people?

Similarly, a patriotic American would now have to be loyal to abortion and gay marriage, since those things have been authoritatively declared fundamental to the American legal order. If he opposed them and appealed to better things in American history and culture, for example the ultimate origins of America in Christendom, and quoted Tocqueville on American religion, morality, and family life, that would be anti-Christian and possibly proto-Nazi, since the basis of the appeal would not apply equally to a Somali refugee who arrived yesterday, or for that matter to a variety of groups who have been here for quite some time. The appeal would therefore have racist and exclusionary aspects that the New York Times could then explain to us.

None of this makes much sense. Man does not live solely by formal institutions like the state on the one hand and private attachments to religious opinions and cultural habits and attitudes on the other. The latter inevitably pervade the former and stop being private, and the two develop historically in a way that eventually causes the community to take on somewhat of an ethnic quality. Americans become Americans who are recognizably different from people in their ancestral countries. The result is the community that government is bound to foster and care for, and the weaker and more chaotic the relationship between institutions and cultural and religious tendencies the less functional the community.

The liberal attempt to make things otherwise leads to endless failure and hypocrisy. It makes self-government impossible, since it makes ordinary people unable to discuss their common affairs in their own terms, it destroys willingness to sacrifice self-interest to a public good that can’t be defined, since there is no common public understanding of what matters in life, and it puts all power in the hands of those who control the formal institutions—billionaires and supposedly neutral and expert bureaucrats. - James Kalb

 - Catholics, Nationalism, and American Identity

Jeg bare gir meg ende over! Uten kameraet som medisin og James Kalb som terapeut, ville det vært umulig å eksistere. Det hele forklarer Totenpark-prosjektet, som er et statlig ideologisk prosjekt, hvor enhver som kritiserer dette, er en landssviker, eller Toten-sviker. Ja, jeg har da også blitt kalt uekte totning og blitt bedt om å falle på kne for ydmykt å be om tilgivelse for å ha kritisert Totenpark-prosjektet, samt at jeg ble hånet for min idealisme, for deretter å bli kastet ut av min bedrift med beskjed om å komme meg ut av den bobla jeg lever i, av de politisk korrekte. Samt at Statanistene i slekta var på gamlefar for å fortelle meg at jeg ikke hadde noe med å blande meg borti hvordan billionærene og de antatte nøytrale byråkratiske ekspertene, organiserer Totenpark-prosjektet til det beste for oss alle. Videre var jeg selvsagt en hatsk og uhyggelig far, som den moderne inkvisisjonen burde holde et skarpt øye med, fordi jeg verdsatte min industri-elvetradisjon samt mitt fedrealter, mine forfedres urbane landsby ved Kværnumsstrykene, og ikke minst kulturelva mi.

Heller ikke er det noen vits i å forsøke å få til noen fornuftig samtale med noe menneske lenger, med et unntak av Nils Faarlund, fordi, som James Kalb forklarer så godt: "The liberal attempt to make things otherwise leads to endless failure and hypocrisy. It makes self-government impossible, since it makes ordinary people unable to discuss their common affairs in their own terms, it destroys willingness to sacrifice self-interest to a public good that can’t be defined, since there is no common public understanding of what matters in life, and it puts all power in the hands of those who control the formal institutions—billionaires and supposedly neutral and expert bureaucrats."

Ja, for vanlige mennesker har det blitt umulig å diskutere felles affærer på egne termer. Derfor har enga mi, som skulle vært ei eng i ei grythe, blitt ulevelig, fordi den er omgitt av motkultur, hvor husmannstroen har blitt irrelevant og en trussel mot Statan som ideologisk prosjekt, og hvor hver bolig er en utgruppe med sin egen, konkurrerende forestilling av virkeligheten. Stakkars, stakkars himmelengene og grenda til Totenåsens apostel!