As more and more information is uncovered about faked terror attacks, bogus threats to our safety, government and military covert operations, "secret wars" and the duplicity that seems to have defined the nature of almost every "ruling elite" over the past two millennia, we are forced to consider the possibility that there has been no public war fought whose officially stated objective could not have been achieved in secret, far from the gaze or awareness of the general public.

Consider the many secret campaigns, waged at the behest of successive US governments, that are only now, many years after the fact, coming to light. In Chile for example, the CIA were able to effect the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and replace it with the 30-year-long brutal dictatorship of Pinochet. The benefits for the US administration at the time, were little different than if the US military had invaded Chile en masse and made the country an American protectorate - but they did not, simply because there was no need to.

Following on from this, we must then consider the possibility that every public, large-scale war of any significance that has been fought in recent history has been fought for a motive other than that which was officially stated. We might say that, as a general rule, one of the major goals of all wars (other than the basic death suffering and money-making) has been, and continues to be, the shaping of the perception of reality of a particular groups of people or humanity as a whole, in order to accomplish the true, longer term and unspoken objectives of the war makers.

Consider World War II for example. There exists copious and detailed evidence to suggest that Hitler was actually facilitated in his rise to power by the very people who would later claim that he was a threat to the entire planet, a claim which lead to the deaths of 65 million people and the establishment of the state of Israel. WWII could have been prevented simply by denying this support, or in the unlikely event that Hitler were to somehow continue to unilaterally accrue power even in the absence of such support, efforts could have been made, "a la Chile" to neutralise the threat that he presented. But this is not what happened. Someone wanted the massive trauma, bloodshed and re-ordering of the geopolitical world map that resulted from the "war to end all wars", and they had the knowledge and power to make it happen, while convincing the world that it was the result of pure chance.

Consider the following article from the UK Guardian newspaper which we ran on the September 25th edition of the Signs page

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Interesting legacy eh? The current president's sojourn in the White House was made possible, in part, by the fact that his grandfather facilitated the deaths of 65 million people during WWII and profited enormously from it.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

"Remarkably"?? We wonder in what way the authors of this article believe that a scandal of such proportions would become public knowlege? Would the scandal simply declare itself to the public? How does "Joe sixpack", preoccupied with the concerns of daily living, get his information? The blindness of the authors as to how the mainstream media actually funtions is all the more remarkable given that the authors themselves work for a mainstream press publication and must surely be aware of the editing that certain stories are subjected to. Are they really unable to make the simple deduction that, since knowledge is power, those in power control the extent of the knowledge that is made available to the public? They seem to be completely unaware of how the military-industrial complex operates and just how all-powerful it is, but then again, most people on this planet are in a similarly uneduated position.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Why is the argument hinging on whether or not Prescott Bush and his associates were sympathetic to the Nazi cause? This is about money and power, not ideals. Is the current George Bush sympathetic to the "Arab terrorist" cause? Only insofar as furthering that agenda furthers his own goals, and those goals and the goals of Prescott Bush at the time are the real issue.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

In 1924, his [Prescott's] father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

Right here, the authors of this article have an opportunity to take their first step towards considering the possibility of a conspiracy. Why was the investigation into Bush's links with Nazi Germany dropped? Do investigations drop themselves? Sadly, the authors' abilities for independent thought and real investigative journalism are either lacking or they realise that there is a limit to the conclusions they are allowed to present. We do not blame them of course most journalists are completely unaware of the true nature and purpose of the industry they are involved in, and who really controls it. As David Rockefeller made clear back in 1991 in Germany:

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." David Rockefeller... Baden-Baden, Germany 1991

For our part, and like the authors of this article, we are merely presenting our own conclusions, the difference however is that, while we do not have the ears of the masses as they do, we are thankfully unrestricted from any allegiances, other than our declared allegiance to the truth.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

Note that, in the above paragraph, the words "to ensure our interests are protected", refers to the interests of Prescott Bush and Co, and involved the use of "slave labour" from the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Whan an honorable family history the current US president has...

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Again, how does "all concrete evidence" of the ownership of a large mulitnational company, evidence which was openly available beforehand, suddenly "disappear"? Do the documents "disappear" themselves?

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

Now hang on a minute... is the above paragraph really suggesting what we think it is suggesting? An "Executive Order", that is, a high-level government-approved legislative decree, was "ignored" because it clashed with the goals of a bunch of industrialists? Where does that leave the voice of the people? Where does that leave democracy? Who really runs the government? Rather than repeating ourselves and further taxing your ability to believe a bunch of "left wing conspiracy theorists" like us, we will let a past pillar of American society, who was in a position to know, spell it out for you:

"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts...newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. - John F Hylan - Mayor of New York 1918-1925

We should, however, not ignore the little detail of extreme importance that forms the subject of abovementioned executive order which was "ignored". The US government was ordered by the Roosevelt to "take all measures to rescue the European Jews", yet this was not done, and indeed, there is much evidence (some of which is detailed below) which suggests that the fact that the European Jews found themselves in a position where they needed to be rescued was also part of a carefully laid plan.

Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.

So Hitler was funded and brought to power by a coterie of American and European "businessmen". Now that really is newsworthy!

"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were." [...]

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.

In the above article and the sources it cites alone, we have enough evidence to reasonably conclude that Hitler was not a "lone madmen", despite what our history books proclaim. He was clearly backed by certain international "bankers" and "industrialists", among them the grandfather of the current US president.

Yet the real crux of this mystery, and indeed its solution, lies not in any quirks or innate dispositions of the personalities involved, but rather in a tried and tested 'modus operandi' that has served and continues to serve the power elite very well, as they go about their business of controlling the population of this planet. As the last paragraph in the above article states, war is a profitable business, but it is also indispensable in shaping the global balance of power and shepherding the masses to an ever finer order of control, both physically and in terms of our perception of reality.

Prescott Bush, and those that financed him (for he too had his unseen 'backers') understood this very clearly. They also knew that, left to its own devices, there exists the distinct chance that human society will, by and large, evolve in a peaceful way. In such a situation, war must be manufactured, and if there is no enemy, then one must be created. It is a rather simple and logical plan when one thinks about it objectively, but few of us are willing to allow for the possibility that such callousness might form part of human thinking, let alone play a central role in the strategy of those tasked with governing us - and it is this tendency to deny reality, to prefer our own subjective and illusory view of 'what is' over objective truth, that may, in the final analysis, make us the architects of our own destruction, albeit at the hands of those that mercilessly exploited and used our wishful thinking against us.

Looking then at the present day and the incorrigible 'Bush the younger' and his intolerable "war on terror", we see that the strategy remains the same. Today, instead of Hitler, we have Bin Laden and Al-Zarqawi, instead of the Reichstag fire, we have 9/11, and a whole host of "Arab terrorists" apparently only too ready to act as the touch paper that will ignite yet another world-wide holocaust. The "perfect enemy" that these bogeymen represent for Bush, Sharon and Co. are more than likely backed by the same "international bankers" and "industrialists" that funded Hitler.

Their goal this time? Well, it appears that the staged 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Iraq constituted the most recent steps of the grand finale that was begun with the backing of Hitler, the Second world war and the creation of the state of Israel that resulted. The goal, is war in the Middle East and, ultimately, the destruction of the semitic people - true Jews and Arabs alike.

Talking of goals. For the masses on this planet to continue to procastinate, only to realise too late that we were correct in our assertions, is not our goal, the evidence that we are indeed correct is available to us all, right now. Wake up, before it is too late.

We realise that we are now on shaky ground, not from the point of view of the facts - since, while they remain largely hidden from public view, they are well documented - but rather from the standpoint of the general beliefs that we all hold about the events that make up the history of our planet, our own lives, their meaning in relation to those events and history, and the people that sit in control over both.

We have all been taught to believe in free will over determinism, that things happen randomly, bound only by the potentially infinite imagination of any individual(s) or group(s). We believe that, at any given moment, there is as much chance for "good" to bless our existence as there is for "evil" to blemish it. We all eagerly subscribe to such a thesis since, while it means that we are essentially victims of chance, there remains the possibility that we can, through our own efforts, maximise the incidence of "good". Unfortunately, the facts do not bear out such a thesis.

As Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in the introduction to her newly revised and updated book "Ancient Science":

"The Laws of Probability tell us that, without any intelligent input, 50% of the time the events in our world would lead to great good and benefit for mankind. In a strictly mechanical way, life in our world ought to have manifested a sort of "equilibrium." Factoring in intelligent decisions to do good might bring this average up to about 70%. That would mean that humanity would have advanced over the millennia to a state of existence where good and positive things happen in our lives more often than "negative" or "bad" things. In this way, many of the problems of humanity would have been effectively solved. War and conflict would be a rarity, perhaps 70 percent of the earth’s population would have decent medical care, a comfortable roof over their heads, and sufficient nutritious food so that death by disease or starvation would be almost unheard of.
The facts are, however, quite different."

An objective and in depth analysis of the facts surrounding the origins, evolution, and now impending destruction of our species (as found in Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s excellent book "Ancient Science", suggests that an unseen hand has, for many, many years, been guiding us in a very definite direction.

And like a single player playing both sides of the chessboard, it appears that, unless we wake up to the reality of our predicament, there can be only one outcome.

So if there is hope, where might it be found? Consider the following article from "The New Scientist" magazine from May 2003:

Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is one of the few philosophers you will have heard of. Over the past 20 years he has produced a series of best-selling books, including Consciousness Explained and Darwin 's Dangerous Idea. In his new book, Freedom Evolves, Dennett takes on one of the big questions in philosophy how is free will compatible with a scientific view of the world?

[...] The British mathematician John Conway developed a "Game of Life" in the 1960s, in which a computer screen is divided into pixels. Some are On, filled black, and others are Off. Sets of simple rules determine how neighbouring pixels change. In this very simple world, you can see complex patterns emerge. Some patterns of cells move around and persist for a long time, avoiding being eaten up by others. So here you can see what I call "the birth of avoidance". And right at the moment of birth, we can discern a key distinction some kinds of harm can in principle be avoided. So in a world where everything is deterministic there can be an increase in "evitability" a word I use for the opposite of inevitability.

How does this work?

It is the very reliability of deterministic worlds that makes it possible for organisms to extract information from the world so that they can look ahead and avoid disasters that they see coming. In a truly random world everything really would be inevitable. It is just the opposite of what people often think a world of randomness would be a world where everything was inevitable and nothing was evitable.

Here is another way to think about it. Something is inevitable for you if there is nothing you can do about it. If an undetermined bolt of lightning strikes you dead, then we can truly say there was nothing you could have done about it. You had no advance warning. In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts may strike, you will be better off if their timing and location is determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. This should help break the traditional link between determinism and despair.

So freedom is bound up with being able to see the future coming. Having sophisticated nervous systems, we may be better able to predict the future and avoid harm. Is that the origin of your title "Freedom Evolves" ?

Yes. The French poet Paul Valery once spoke of "producing future". I like to think that 's what brains are for they are for producing future. You extract information from the past and use it to produce future, and the more future you can produce the more freedom you have.

At the primitive beginnings of life there is precious little freedom. Then organisms that respond appropriately to changing conditions are the ones that are more likely to have progeny. The tracking of reasons by behaviours is a process that starts very simple and then gradually creates ever more sophisticated "proto-agents". They begin to have the ability to discriminate between different states in the world, and then eventually actively gather information in order to make more long-range adjustment to their plans so that they can be guided by information.

The task of controlling all that freedom becomes an ever bigger part of what you 're up to, and in the course of evolution the growth in nervous systems really becomes explosive. At the very pinnacle of that particular heap is us, because we have so many more things that we can do and so many more reasons for doing them or from refraining from doing them. [...]

All of the above ties into what we have been saying for some time. We live in a system which is predetermined to be "chaotic" or "indeterminable". This "indeterminability" is effected by preventing those that interact with the system (reality) from being able to read the past, predict the future and thereby protect themselves from the more negative aspects of life and existence.

Central to this is the idea of the 'quality', or objectivity, with which those that observe or view their reality do so. The higher the quality or objectivity of the observation the less 'predetermined chaos' that we are subject to. Of course our own 'systems' seem to be set up by default to tend towards subjectivity and as a result we merely contribute to the chaotic state. But by making it our goal to always seek out and acknowledge the truth both within ourselves and in the world 'out there' we can afford ourselves some protection against being sucked into the encroaching chaos that today seems to be be increasing at a frightening rate.

True and objective knowledge, then, when honest and sincere efforts are made to incorporate it into who we are and how we live our lives and view our reality, really can protect in the most amazing ways.