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April 15, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:01
Notre Dame Burns!
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So, Notre Dame Cathedral, it would seem, is virtually no more.
Firefighters in Paris are working to, at this point, I think, control a massive fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, which is in the heart of the city, of course.
Today, just before 7 p.m.
local time, which seems significant, the fire began and spread rapidly throughout the cathedral.
And this cathedral has lasted for well over 800 years.
Construction began in 1163 and it was built on the ruins of two earlier churches.
The fire is said to be related to renovations and construction that are underway at the World Heritage Site and the building also is home to some of the world's most valuable art.
And as I was watching, which gives me of course flashbacks to 9-11, the spire on top of the Notre Dame Cathedral collapsed in the middle of this raging fire.
It was a later addition to the building, but it is one of the most recognizable parts of the church.
And the structure fell about an hour after the fire started.
And the church took almost a hundred years to build.
The foundation stone was laid in front of Pope Alexander III in 1163, and building the work on the initial major structure completed in 1260.
So I have a little bit of experience in this.
When I was a software entrepreneur I wrote extensive computer code to help companies comply with OSHA occupational health and safety requirements and I visited a number of construction sites and I remember going to see one.
It was a mining site.
I was taken on a tour by the head engineer and they talked about how they were so concerned about even the safety of animals that they would take a rabbit warren Take the rabbits, move them out, do what they needed to do and then move them back in.
They really try to be as safe as humanly possible.
So whenever there's even the possibility of a fire at a construction site, workers get trained.
Fire suppression materials are everywhere and Even if there's a possibility of smoldering later on like let's say you did something that was heat based or fire based and then you Put the fire out Oftentimes, I don't know what the regulations are in France.
I mean they are very anal about these kinds of regulations health and safety is strict to a fault perhaps in the EU but You leave a worker there for a couple hours to make sure that there's no blowback from anything that's smoldering.
Fire is a major concern.
Incredible precautions are taken just on a regular construction site.
I mean, so imagine how careful people would be when working on one of the most famous major historical and religious landmarks in the world.
So what does this mean?
Well, the official explanation for what people are saying now is, oh, it was just an accident.
Well, nobody knows, of course, right?
And of course, if the fire is burning the thing to the ground, it may never be known.
But what are the two possibilities?
Well, either A, it's massive carelessness, like staggering levels of carelessness.
When you are given care, custody and control, of one of the most major religious, cultural, historical landmarks in the world.
You take damn good care of that thing.
So the idea that, well, there was just an oopsie, you know, somebody dropped a match, I mean, it's not, to me, not very credible.
Not very credible.
So, but it could be, it could be massive carelessness or, of course, it could be arson.
I suspect the latter.
I simply suspect the latter.
And we'll find out, or we may never find out, of course, as we go forward.
But people who, like I was tweeting about this, and people are like, well, you've got to wait for the truth!
Don't jump to conclusions!
And then they say, but it was just an accident!
It's like, well, that's a conclusion.
That's a conclusion.
If there was an arsonist who either slipped in to the work site or was one of the workers, If there was an arsonist, how would they know it was an accident?
Well, I guess they'd talk to the workers, and the workers would say, oh, it was an accident.
Or one of the workers would say, it was an accident.
But that's exactly what an arsonist would say.
So, again, it's not proof.
But that's my particular suspicion.
So you can't say, well, wait for the truth.
But it was an accident.
They're mutually exclusive statements.
And come on.
Governments lie all the time.
Governments cover things up all the time.
French government misrepresented the Bataclan massacre, pretty significantly, until they couldn't.
So what makes you think you're going to get the truth about this at all?
I mean, and who's going to believe it now?
I mean, Emmanuel Macron's government is highly unpopular, massively distrusted.
Why?
Because the French people didn't listen to me about who not to vote for at least.
So he's so unpopular, particularly now that these yellow vests Rebellions have been going on week after week after week and they've been pretty brutal responses.
So trust in Macron's government is very low.
So who's going to believe the official explanation?
This is a huge issue.
Now, as far as attacks upon the Catholic churches, that's pretty significant and I'll put links to this Below, France has seen a spate of attacks against Catholic churches since the start of the year.
This is this year, right?
This came out to 21st of March 2019.
Vandalism that has included arson and desecration.
Vandals have smashed statues, knocked down tabernacles, scattered or destroyed the Eucharist, and torn down crosses, sparking fears of a rise in anti-Catholic sentiment in the country.
Last Sunday, the historic church of St Sulpice in Paris was set on fire just after midday mass on Sunday.
Le Parisien reported although no one was injured.
Police are still investigating the attack which firefighters have confidently attributed to arson.
Built in the 17th century, St Sulpice houses three works by the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and was used in the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Last month, at the St.
Nicholas Catholic Church in Huys, in north-central France, a statue of the Virgin Mary was found smashed and the altar cross had been thrown on the ground.
According to La Croix Internationale, a Catholic publication, also in February, at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Laveur, in south-central France, an altar cloth was burned and crosses and statues of saints were smashed.
The attack prompted Laveur Mayor Bernard Canyon to say in a statement, God will forgive, not me.
And in the southern city of Nimes, near the Spanish border, vandals looted the altar of the Church of Notre Dame des Enfants, a Lady of the Children, and smeared a cross with human excrement.
Consecrated hosts made from unleavened bread, which Catholics believed to be the body of Jesus Christ, were taken and found scattered among rubbish outside the building.
The Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, which was founded in cooperation with the Council of European Bishops' Conference, but is now independent, said there had been a 25% increase in attacks on Catholic churches in the first two months of the year compared with the same last year.
Now, where is this coming from?
I mean, of course, people will think of radical Muslims, but it could be any number of groups, or it could be any combination of groups.
It could be radical atheists, it could be radical secularists, it could be radical leftists, it could be somebody who was a group of people who had been attacked by priests as children.
Who knows?
Who knows?
But the idea that we know what happened at the moment is ridiculous.
It is ridiculous, but the official explanation, to me, is almost always not something that we should take seriously.
So, this is, I mean, it's all speculation, but these are just little questions that pop into my head, knowing a little bit as I do about construction sites and the focus on safety, just for regular construction sites, let alone something this powerful and important.
Well, the fire started After the end of the regular workday, right?
Just before 7 p.m.
local time.
Now, maybe there's a lot of night work, but I doubt it.
It's kind of tough to work at night.
So, if it started right... well, long after the end of the usual workday, and, you know, workdays in France are not always the longest things, then how can it be work?
How can it be construction work if it's after the end of the usual workday?
Now, the fire started, according to reports, right after the cathedral closed.
Right after the cathedral closed, right?
According to French officials, there were no deaths.
The cathedral closed at 1845, 645, and the fire started five or six minutes after.
Now that's interesting.
Of course, you want to wait till people have left so there's fewer people to observe the fire.
And so this is just some comments that I got.
I can't verify them, but I think they're interesting.
Somebody said, work started weeks ago and all the wiring and scaffolding was already up.
The practices on a site like this would be put together in specific ways to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
The company doing the work would hold billions in liability for damages.
Somebody else said the contractors working would have to have impeccable records and the finest health and safety management systems to work on such a site.
Every precaution possible would have to be implemented.
European health and safety laws are the best in the world.
So it could have been an accident but what one hell of an accident and so much would be like When I was working in this area, the amount of precautions, the amount of concern, the amount of, like, every single thing that you had that could possibly be hazarded had to have the materials.
Safety data sheet, like, right, access nearby, you had to have fire extinguishers everywhere, there were drills, there was training, and that's just on a regular old factory floor or something like that.
The idea that it could just be a, oops, we burnt down a cathedral,
That it stood for close to a thousand years, that it survived world wars, that had survived the French Revolution, religious warfare, that it survived centuries where there were no such thing as fire hydrants, or foam flame retardant canisters, or fire trucks, or modern emergency response infrastructure, or cell phones, or anything like that.
And that it had been illuminated, throughout most if not all of its history, by candlelight!
You've got candles all over the place and robes.
And for 800 plus years, it survives.
So, somebody else said, I worked in construction for years, many of them with iron workers.
We had only one fire and it was quickly extinguished.
There are fire watches for every hot job that stay in that area up to three hours to make sure nothing has been kindled.
This is suspicious.
And it's not the first, right?
of it a couple of years ago.
This is an article headline, Notre Dame bomb plot, three women charged with planned blow-up car near Paris tourist attraction.
So this is what is going on.
Will we know the truth?
I think it's vaguely possible.
It is very unpleasant, of course, to see the number of people cheering the burning down of this church and we will see if any new information comes out but this is a massive massive blow to Western culture, to Western religion, to Western history, to the continuity of our institutions.
I did a show pretty recently with Dr. Woodley about intelligence just kind of falling Around the West and it's not just related to immigration.
Although that's part of it because even within particular populations like whites Intelligence seems to be falling and the argument was well This is why we can't have nice things because we just don't seem to have the intelligence to maintain the achievements of our ancestors We can't have the Concorde because it was too complicated to maintain.
We can't have space flight anymore because the brilliance of the past is a mere optical of the present.
Like, you know, you're in a dark room and you suddenly see a bright light or lightning or something like that outside.
Your eyes are dazzled for a short amount of time.
And it seems like you still have light, although the light is gone.
And it feels that way in the West at the moment.
That we had an incredibly bright light for a short amount of time, culminating in the stone geniuses of the West, Victorian era brilliance, where there were 16 major innovations per year, per billion people.
Now it's down to four, but a 75% drop in brilliance and innovation, even with massive amounts of extra education and government spending on the sciences and We are losing it.
I have this fear that the glories of the West, the glories of the world, I mean, the West is responsible for the invention of the modern world.
Way north of 90% of major scientific innovations from 800 BC to 1950 AD came from males, mostly in Europe and North America.
So this is my concern.
Let's just say all of this was just a giant oopsie.
What series of dominoes had to fall till an iconic religious centerpiece of Western history and civilization turns to ash in one short evening?
It's like that scene in Atlas Shrugged in the train going into the tunnel.
These kinds of disasters are almost never mere accidents.
Why did it seem to take so long for the responders to show up?
Who's working there?
What's going on?
Who's in charge?
Were safety procedures followed?
Were there accelerants?
What happened?
Why can't we... Why can't we, who have been Given these enormous treasures from relatively recent history, why can't we keep a cathedral upright that was handed to us over the space of almost a thousand years?
Why can't we just fix it as it had been fixed in the past without burning the damn thing to the ground?
Is our civilization Or what we are living in now?
Just the afterglow of a brilliant bright light of momentary genius that came spent itself and vanished and all we have now is the eye-burning afterglow
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