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I suppose the direct comparison between checkpoints and modal filtering hadn't occurred to me. Given that Checkpoint Charlie was probably the most famous border crossing into and out of East Germany of the cold war, I think the link with totalitarianism is arguable at least; IME anti-LTN types like to conceive of cyclists and 'the cycling lobby' as a malign totalitarian force, out to crush their freedoms.
Thrustvector-
Well then, which one is the totalitarian bit, Ealing or Hounslow? :)
The famous design is the American one, but variants of those signs were all over Berlin, at every sector boundary. I obviously have no idea what the originators were really thinking, but I find it most obvious that they're criticising the restriction of movement. It's entirely possible that they were thinking of Checkpoint Charlie specifically or the sector boundaries in general, I don't know.
Oliver Schick
... which those signs, arguably, are not? They're an allusion to the post-war occupation of Berlin, and only one of the four powers involved was totalitarian. Or would you call the occupation totalitarian in itself? The stunt seems to me to be about the restriction on freedom of movement that some people think modal filtering represents.