Originally Posted by Baron von Lotsov

Global warming is just a side effect in all of this. Having had some deep thoughts about this, I'm convinced the Communists are using the charity/NGO sector as their trogan horse to destroy the free market. If you think about it we have traditionally had a market economy to quite a large extent. It provides structure to our country, it represents the structure and so to destroy it without a replacement structure would be counterproductive and most likely lead to failure.

This happened towards the end of the seventies where they used the unions as their trogan horse but the act of destroying the free market by excessive political interference in the representation of workers backfired on them. People were left without basic necessities and we had power cuts and even food shortages. I recall when there was a shortage of sugar in the shops. I was a little young to understand why but I felt a deep sense that something was going very badly wrong. This then allowed Thatcher to machine gun them down and she did a mighty fine job and was considered a heroin during the early eighties when people started to notice that things were starting to work again. Everything started to look prosperous, things like our train station had a new paint job and was done up whereas the ten years before it just fell into decay. So money started to circulate once again and people were working and prospering.

Now I think what these Communists must have thought was that they needed to build an alternative structure alongside their much hated Capitalist system and then bit by bit transfer power and control as the new structure was sufficient to be able to take it on. This new structure would have no market to it and would be centralised and autocratic. The people on the ground would not know anything about the people behind closed doors who produced the orders at the top of the command structure except that they would believe in them and would never ever question their motives, the mental state that says they can do no wrong, and are all-good.

This is a sort of Nietzschean position that man can be God or take the place of God. You will also notice that Communists are atheist because this is what you have, the people are only supposed to worship their leaders and their leaders are 'God'. They have the power over life and death, e.g. when these God like charities are handing out food in third world countries. No one ever stops to question why the poverty still exists. And as for our county's traditional religion, well you can see what the Red Cross make of it at Christmas time. There was a big reaction to their mean position but no one ever questioned exactly why they did these things. Logically speaking they would not have done it to make themselves popular and neither was it a mistake either. There is another reason and it is the heart of Communism, the psychological relationship between the proletariat and state. (And you thought the Red Cross was called 'red' because of the colour of the cross!)

Originally Posted by The Bear

One of the (increasingly few) things that I remember from my school days was that the Red Cross movement was started by a Swiss guy called Henry Dunent.

He did this after seeing the huge number of casualties who had just been left to die after the Battle of Solferno in 1859 (I think, it was 50 years ago that I learned this stuff!)

The Red Cross emblem was chose simply because the offices of the organisation were established in Geneva and so a modified form of the Swiss flag was used with a red cross against a white background that we know today.

Clear to see, a based on the flag of a neutral country, and an agenda that was not partisan, it immediately took hold.

That is why the Red Cross has a red cross on a white ground. It's got sod all to do with communism.

Originally Posted by Baron von Lotsov

The Bear

Has this country become more or less of a free market economy in the last ten years? Ways to tell would be the proportion of our labour that we decide on what to use it for as opposed to government and the number of companies in each market and their market share. I think 'complete absence' is somewhat exaggerated unless you are talking about their methods as opposed to the outcome.