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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
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.