Michael Totten, "Twenty Years After the Fall of the Tyrant"

My admiration for my friend Michael Totten grows exponentially with the number of countries he travels to and writes about. He's made his career as an international correspondant under his own terms, and is as good as anyone writing in the field. Today's post is about Romania, twenty years after the fall of Ceausescu. Here, you will find Michael speaking with members of Parliment, and attending a Bucharest press conference where Joe Biden expresses his appreciation for Romania's troops alongside America's in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

What also marks Michael's brilliance, for me, is his range of scholarship, as when he observes how Romania's urban landscapes so brutally reflect the ugliness that is totalitarianism.

The brilliant Anthony Daniels, who now writes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, loathes ghastly brutalist architecture as much as I do. He properly blames the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his baleful influence for wrecking so many once beautiful cities like Bucharest and even marring cities like London.

"Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform," Daniels recently wrote in City Journal. "In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy." Le Corbusier, he says, "was the enemy of mankind" and "does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism."

...

On a blank gray wall in the parking lot across from my hotel, an artist painted cogs in a machine the size of Godzilla chewing the city to pieces.

photo by Michael Totten

Go read the whole thing.

Comments

[Michael J. Totten]

Thanks, Nancy!