In the wake of the Notre Dame fire, both French politicians and private donors, including billionaires, pledged to rebuild the Church. Emmanuel Macron promised — rather unconvincingly — to have the church rebuilt within five years.

In response, some observers questioned why a government should be in the business of rebuilding churches. After all, doesn’t Notre Dame have insurance?

Well, it turns out Notre Dame doesn’t have insurance, and that leads us to a larger problem with the church.

Marxian doctrine doesn’t deny the possibility of absolute truth, but it maintains that absolute truth can be attained only in the classless society. Or in the proletarian class society.

The United States has a long, violent history of intervention in Latin America, although few Americans know about it. Were one to ask the average American, for example, about the US occupation of the Dominican Republic — which lasted for eight years from 1916 to 1924 — one is likely to only receive a blank stare in return.

Even in the cases of those interventions which are more famous — such as the Spanish-American War or the Panama invasion of 1989 — details remains virtually unknown among much of the general public.

Although this paper was presented as a lecture in 1996, I have chosen to publish it in this volume in nearly its original manuscript form.1 It was never previously published or posted electronically, but the paper achieved a limited circulation in manuscript form via copy and fax machines during the primitive days of the Internet.

Scanning the headlines, one might notice that there is now a multitude of articles on the measles virus in most major media outlets. Outbreaks in places like New York City have led to what the AP calls “extraordinary police powers” to mandate vaccinations or quarantine those suspected of the disease.