Rurik Halaby Still Promoting the Failed Aronsohn Vision for Ridgewood

Rurik Posted: I took this on a trip to Paris in 1969.  The Eiffel Tower is one of the most famous structures in the world and the symbol of Paris.  Millions visit it every year.  An interesting tale behind the building of the Tower.  When the the plans were announced in the 1880‘s a committee of 300 leading citizens of Paris issued the following statement, per Wikepedia:  “We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.”  Makes you think of their present day Ridgewood descendants, the Vocalantis, those self absorbed fools who are unable to see past the tip of their noses.

this was posted on Facebook in the “it take a Ridgewood Village ” group on Monday December 19th.

While Mr Halaby attempts to use the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of what the rejection of Aronsohn’s flawed vision of Ridgewood could mean we suggest the Nazi occupation of Paris a more fitting symbol.

Here is a small history lesson:

Germans attacked France and quickly defeated the French army in 1940. The French government departed Paris on June 10, and the Germans occupied the city on June 14. During the Occupation, the French Government moved to Vichy, and Paris was governed by the German military and by French officials approved by the Germans.

For the Parisians, the Occupation was a series of frustrations, shortages and humiliations. A curfew was in effect from nine in the evening until five in the morning; at night, the city went dark. Rationing of food, tobacco, coal and clothing was imposed from September 1940. Every year the supplies grew more scarce and the prices higher. A million Parisians left the city for the provinces, where there was more food and fewer Germans. The French press and radio contained only German propaganda.

Jews in Paris were forced to wear the yellow Star of David badge, and were barred from certain professions and public places. On 16–17 July 1942, 13,152 Jews, including 4,115 children and 5.919 women, were rounded up by the French police, on orders of the Germans, and were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The first demonstration against the Occupation, by Paris students, took place on 11 November 1940. As the war continued, anti-German clandestine groups and networks were created, some loyal to the French Communist Party, others to General Charles de Gaulle in London. They wrote slogans on walls, organized an underground press, and sometimes attacked German officers. Reprisals by the Germans were swift and harsh.

Following the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the French Resistance in Paris launched an uprising on August 19, 1944, seizing the police headquarters and other government buildings. The city was liberated by French and American troops on August 25, and General Charles de Gaulle led a triumphant parade down the Champs-Élysées on August 26, and organized a new government. In the following months, ten thousand Parisians who had collaborated with the Germans were arrested and tried, eight thousand convicted, and 116 executed. On 29 April and 13 May 1945, the first post-war municipal elections were held, in which French women voted for the first time.