The Notre Dame fire only damaged the cathedral.  Fire damage is repairable, even to an ancient and historical building like Notre Dame.

More than one billion dollars has been raised to repair Notre Dame Cathedral.

It is one of the the most heavily documented buildings in the world.  There are actual 3-D Laser scans of every square inch of the building.

And keep in mind that construction of Notre Dame started in 1163 and ended in 1345.  The building is between 674 and 857 years old.

It has gone though the Napoleonic Wars, French Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, WWI, and WWII.

French Radicals during the French Revolution engaged in iconoclasm, and did severe damage to the Notre Dame Cathedral.

The Cathedral had fallen into disrepair, as just another old building in Europe, until the international success of Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, revitalized French pride in the Cathedral and it was restored as a French monument.

The point is, the fire alone damaged Notre Dame, but it’s fine.  That can be fixed.

To truly destroy a great monument to Western Civilization, you need to unleash the progressives.

From Reuters:

As Notre-Dame money rolls in, some eyebrows raised over rush of funds

Pledged donations from French billionaires, companies and ordinary citizens for the restoration of fire-ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral are approaching 900 million euros after just two days, a reflection of the landmark’s resonance in the national psyche.

But the outpouring has prompted questions from charities, politicians and commentators about why some of the business donors have offered so much so quickly, including speculation about how they might benefit from tax breaks on the donations.

Forget fixing such as historically and culturally significant building as Notre Dame, we can’t let those rich people get their tax breaks.

This is the same attitude that made AOC and other NYC progressives drive off Amazon HQ2.  They just allow the creation of 25,000 new jobs, billions in tax revenue, and putting a major business in what is now an empty lot, if it causes a Billionaire to become just a little more rich.

If a Billionaire cured all cancer everywhere at the cost of paying no income tax ever again, these people would consider it a net loss for the world.  This is a political sickness.

Then again, this attitude stems from the same one that killed 100 Million people in the failed experiment of socialism.

People on social media, both in France and abroad, have expressed frustration that other disasters – from the Syrian and Iraq refugee crisis to the Grenfell Tower fire in London – have not received anything like the same degree of support.

What is Progressivism without oppression Olympics.  Notre Dame can’t be rebuilt after a tragedy like this because other damage done to other people under other circumstances hasn’t been equally fixed.

From The New York Times:

As Rich Lavish Cash on Notre-Dame, Many Ask: What About the Needy?

The pledges came in quick succession.

François-Henri Pinault, France’s second-richest man, put up an eye-popping 100 million euros to rebuild Notre-Dame, just as firefighters were dousing the last flames at the cathedral early Tuesday morning. Not to be outdone, Bernard Arnault, France’s wealthiest scion and a fierce rival to Mr. Pinault and to his father, François Pinault, upped the ante with a 200-million-euro gift a few hours later.

By Wednesday, the government had welcomed some 850 million euros — more than $960 million — offered in the patriotic name of salvaging the cultural treasure, as money from wealthy French families, French companies and international corporations poured in.

But the spectacle of billionaires trying to one-up one another quickly intensified resentments over inequality that have flared during the Yellow Vest movement, just as President Emmanuel Macron was looking to transform the calamity into a new era of national unity. There were accusations that the wildly rich were trying to wash their reputations during a time of national tragedy.

“If they’re able to give dozens of millions to rebuild Notre Dame,” he added, “they should stop telling us that there is no money to pay for social inequalities.”

Ollivier Pourriol, a French philosopher and novelist, summed up the sentiment more drolly.

Nothing like the resentment of the victim class.

The short answer is, what the Yellow Vests want is more of the socialism that has already done so much damage to the French economy.

What upsets the Yellow Vests (which is why the Right seems so attracted to them, even though they are a Leftist group) is money spent on Leftist projects for rich Leftist, like subsidizing solar energy and electric vehicles, and not cradle to grave social welfare policies.

So for the Yellow Vests to see money pour in to do anything but go to them is the zenith of the politics of envy.

From the New York Post:

Yellow vest protesters say Notre Dame donations better spent fighting poverty

Easter mass services have been moved to nearby St. Eustache and St. Sulpice, the latter of which was burned in a separate fire last month.

Some of the gilets jaunes (French for “yellow vests”) carried signs blasting wealthy donors who pledged money to rebuild the church, but have ignored France’s growing homelessness, they said.

“Millions for Notre Dame, what about for us, the poor?” one sign read, according to The Guardian.

“Everything for Notre Dame, nothing for Les Misérables,” another sign said, the paper reported.

The simple answer is “no, the money is not better spent on the poor.”

The issues in France are the same in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.  High tax and spend socialist or quasi-socialist, Leftist policies make the cost of living very expensive while driving down the economy.

The generous social welfare programs only subsidize the bad and destructive behavior of the poor and homeless, increasing the problem.

Just as we’ve seen in the US, if that billion was dumped into taking care of the homeless, it would just create more homeless and turn Paris into a bigger shit hole.

That billion is better spend paying people to restore Notre Dame and the surrounding areas.

But this greed, envy, and soak-the-rich class resentment wasn’t the worst thing published.  That dishonor goes to The Times.

Sharp British ideas for Notre Dame

The new spire on Notre Dame could be a “super-slender needle touching heaven’s clouds”, a minaret or a work of art composed entirely of light, according to some of Britain’s leading architects.

Minaret (/ˌmɪnəˈrɛt, ˈmɪnəˌrɛt/;[1] Persian: مأذنة‎ ma’thena, Azerbaijani: minarə, Turkish: minare[2]), from Arabic: منارة‎ manarah,[3] also known as Goldaste (Persian: گلدسته‎), is a type of tower typically found built into or adjacent to mosques.

Those woke motherfuckers in the UK want to build an Islamic spire on top of the Catholic Cathedral of Notre Dame.

I would rather it burn the rest of the way down and crumble into dust than to deface an 800 year old monument to French Catholicism by putting a fucking Minaret on top of it.  I can’t think of a better symbol of French subjugation to Islamic migration than that.

An international competition is to be held to find a replacement for the spire destroyed in the cathedral fire and British designers have been quick to respond with their ideas.

It gets better from there, these Progressives don’t want to rebuild it with historic accuracy.  History is racist and bigoted.

They want to find a intersectional architect to deface it with a glass ceiling, and probably a safe space and juice bar for tourists.  Turing it into a monument of secular Progressiveness.

That will truly ruin it.

The fire damaged the great Cathedral.

It takes the resentment and wokeness of the Progressive Left to hate the idea of people pledging their money to fix it and to propose repairs that disrespect the history of the building.

There is nothing that Progressives touch that isn’t ruined.

Fire damages but Progressives desecrate and destroy.