November 26, 2025
Destroying Civilization
By Lars Møller
Henry Dawson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Luftwaffe’s bombs of 1940–41 destroyed or damaged roughly half a million British homes and left vast acres of many historic city centers in ruins. What followed, rather than conscientious reconstruction, was a campaign of sustained cultural self-mutilation that lasted from the late 1940s until the 1980s. Under the banners of “modernity”, “progress”, and “slum clearance”, architects, planners, local authorities, and property speculators combined to erase more of Britain’s pre-1914 architectural fabric than the Wehrmacht ever managed. In retrospect, this approach was ideologically misguided, conceited, and detrimental to cultural cohesion. You may wonder if this deliberate annihilation of the visible past was the first symptom of the nihilism, moral relativism, and incipient anti-Western self-hatred that now threaten to consummate the suicide of British civilization.
Begin with the brute facts. Coventry’s medieval center was obliterated by German bombs. Instead of pursuing familiar designs, harmony, and beauty after the war, Sir Basil Spence and the city council approached reconstruction with the insensitivity of foreign victors on a battlefield, replacing a tight lattice of timber-framed streets with a concrete precinct. Likewise, Plymouth, devastated in the Blitz, saw its elegant eighteenth-century grid swept away for Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s windswept “Plan”: broad boulevards flanked by system-built slabs that turned a maritime city into a provincial imitation of Brasília. In Birmingham, the Victorian civic gospel of Joseph Chamberlain—expressed in some of the finest municipal architecture in Europe—was bulldozed by Sir Herbert Manzoni’s Inner Ring Road and a generation of Brutalist megastructures.
By 1979, the Victorian Society calculated that more listed buildings had been demolished in England since 1945 than in the entire preceding four centuries. The enemy, this time, wore Harris tweed and spoke with received pronunciation.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/11/destroying_civilization.html
Topic: Destroying Civilization (Read 15 times)
