Proposition Z

Chapter One: On A Hill In Haiti

Foreword

 My father, R. L. Petrie, died in 2010. Like most sons, I wept when he passed, but like many other father/son relationships it was sometimes fraught and lacking in warmth and any kind of real communication. When he spoke I listened but most of the time he was silent. Taciturn is the word I suppose. A biologist and graduate of Glasgow University he rarely spoke about his work. Maybe he wanted to, perhaps I should have shown more interest. For his sake. But I was young and he was old and the most important thing to me at the time was not 'his sake' but 'my sake'.

Six months after we laid him to rest my mother phoned me. She had found a box in the attic with some papers, photographs, notes, and some movie files on a DVD-RW.

She was still grieving and even though she knew him better than anyone, anything that gave her something to hold onto about him was important to her. Even after he was dead. That is not unusual. Just because you live with someone for 60 years does not mean there are no uncharted waters. And if you have not fully let go they will still pull you towards them.

But in my mother's case it was more than this. When she called she was emotional, enervated even. She wanted me to come down to Glasgow because she said she had found something in that box, something that gave her hope, a promise from beyond the grave. That she and my father would meet again, not in any afterlife but in the here and now. My dead father was going to come back from the dead.

My heart sank, how much more pain was she going to put herself through before she could accept the finality of my fathers passing?

"I want you to look at it. See what you think." she said.

"Of course"

"I know it's probably just me. But I still miss him," Her voice started to break, and then she asked plaintively, like a child.

"Where has he gone?"

I gave her the only honest answer I could.

"No-one knows"

On A Hill In Haiti

 Of all the material in the box, perhaps the most fully-formed was the outline for the documentary. With a little digging, it became clear the Production Company was LaMancha Productions, a Scottish-based company that had produced mainly Military History documentaries for the Discovery Channel. In particular the hugely popular Battlefield Series. They had also made niche programs such as the History Of The Armoured Train, a series on American Gangsters -including Dillon and Capone - and three movies, Chasing The Deer, The Bruce, and a Macbeth with Jason Connery. For my generation, they are probably best remembered for providing the number one torrent on early Pirate Bay - The Occult History Of The Third Reich.

The script/outline was heavily annotated, some of it in my father's handwriting - but I managed to scan and convert it into Word. The following transcript gives a clear idea of what the documentary makers planned to do with the subject matter. It has taken me ten years to get to this point - fear, apprehension, respect for my father's memory - but if I am going to go public, this document is probably the best place to start.

Proposition Z: The End Of The Age Of Man

Any unexplained phenomenon passes through three stages before the reality of it is accepted. During the first stage, it is considered laughable. During the second stage, it is adamantly opposed. Finally, during the third stage, it is regarded as self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

INTRO: VOICEOVER

For the last 100 years a concerted campaign, across all media, has attempted to convince public opinion, despite growing scientific evidence to the contrary, that death is the final stage of the human journey. That there is no such thing as life after death and that the dead cannot be brought back to life. In this program, we shall look at the rationale behind this worldview and why it has been used to serve the interests of the scientific and religious establishments and also some of the most powerful political figures of our age. Not only have dissenting voices been silenced and scientific evidence been suppressed but a worldwide propaganda campaign orchestrated by some of the most dominant media organizations of our time has managed to plant a message via a popular culture that is the exact opposite of what they know to be true. Namely that every human being on this planet has survived and will survive their own deaths.