death

Editors Admit Guilt Over Death

The editors of the three biggest selling tabloid newspapers at the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales have disclosed for the first time their own share of guilt over the accident that killed her.

The editors of The Sun, Daily Mirror and News of the World have conceded that they had helped create an atmosphere in which the paparazzi, who were chasing Diana when her car crashed in a Paris underpass, were out of control.

Phil Hall, who was editor of the News of the World, said it was a circle of culpability involving the readers who demanded more photographs, the photographers who chased her and the newspapers that published the pictures.

"A big Diana story could add 150,000 sales. So we were all responsible," he said.

Mr Hall, speaking on the ITV1 documentary Diana’s Last Summer, said: "I felt huge responsibility for what happened and I think everyone in the media did.

"If the paparazzi hadn’t been following her the car wouldn’t have been speeding and, you know, the accident may never have happened."

He said the princess had often tipped off his newspaper about photo opportunities and invited his executives to lunch at Kensington Palace. "She wanted to try to be on the front foot over her media coverage," he said.

After the death of the princess in Aug 1997, the tabloids said they would ban photographs taken by the paparazzi.

The Sunday Mirror bought the paparazzi pictures, published three weeks before the princess’s death, which first showed the seriousness of her liaison with Dodi Fayed and encouraged the Paris chase.

Stuart Higgins, who edited The Sun, told The Daily Telegraph: "The death of Princess Diana was the most tragic story during my period as editor. I have often questioned my role, the paper’s role and the media’s role generally in her death and the events leading up to it.

"The tabloids created a frenzy and appetite around Diana. But in the end I believe it was just a terrible accident, caused by a drunken driver and possibly because of the lack of the high level of police and security protection that she had enjoyed previously."

Patrick Jephson, her former private secretary, said: "They would chase the royal motorcade on motorcycles. They had pillion passengers carrying heavy television cameras. It all contributed to the sense of being inside a Wild West stagecoach while bandits were attacking it."

Piers Morgan, the then editor of the Daily Mirror, accepted that as editors they had not done enough to curb the wilder excesses of freelance photographers. He said: "Everyone working on national newspapers, in the first few days after she died, felt a collective sense that the paparazzi were out of control in relation to Diana. She was the biggest celebrity we have ever seen and it got completely out of hand."

Asked if it had changed, he said: "No one person attracts the attention she used to. I don’t think any single human being had more fascination to the public, was more intruded upon, or when it suited colluded more."

Mr Morgan said the princess had no choice but to try to dictate some of the media coverage. "I went to lunch with her at Kensington Palace. She pointed out of a window showing me 12 vans and motorbikes from foreign media organisations. That was her daily life. You realised although she did collude she did not have much choice."

He said her death was a "ghastly accident" but added: "We in the media were culpable in allowing the paparazzi to become ridiculously over the top."

Source: This article is reprinted with the permission of Telegraph.co.uk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560857/Princess-Diana-Editors-admit-guilt-over-death.html.

 

 

Yoshio Sato: The Effects of Radiation

A self-portrait of Yoshio Sato after loosing his hair.  There is hair on his pillow.

At the end of August we were sent with high fever to the Red Cross Hospital in a small town about 100 km away from Hiroshima. My mother died on the morning of September 2, less than a month after the atomic bombing. My father told me later that he had been prepared for our funerals to come one after another.

By late autumn, the three of us seemed to be getting better. Our hair began to grow little by little though it was considerably thin. The hair looked thinner at the roots and thicker at the top, or top-heavy. It is to my great regret that I did not keep the hairs as evidence of 'Hiroshima'. In March 1946, sister Masako suddenly died, six months after the bombing.

In 1971, I had half my stomach removed because of cancer. My brother, who had become a medical doctor, died of liver cancer in 1984, despite having had surgery twice. Now, I am the only survivor in my family. The death rate from cancer is clearly higher among those who were exposed to the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than that of those who were not exposed.

Since my retirement as a chemist, I have devoted my life to speaking about the effects of the atomic bomb, going into schools and speaking abroad when I get the chance. I spoke in Vancouver, Canada, in 2001 right after the September 11 attack. After listening to my speech, a young student asked me, "Has the US apologised to you?" My answer was, "No". In May 2005 in New York, where I was taking part in a big peace parade to appeal for the abolition of nuclear weapons, a lady came up to me and gave me a big kiss after she heard my story. She said, "I want to apologise to you."

Even now, there are about 30,000 nuclear bombs in the world. Nuclear weapons, if used, would produce enormous blasts, intense heat and release deadly radiation. The bomb radiation would not only cause victims cancer and other diseases, but would affect the health of their children.

As a survivor of the atomic bombing, I believe it is my mission to inform the people of the world, especially the yound people, of the horror of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons must never be used again and we must in no way allow the existence of nuclear weapons. I truly believe that the people of the world, by knowing and understanding each other, will be able to work together to abolish nuclear weapons and build a peaceful world.

No more war, no more nuclear weapons.

 

Europe Before the Conquest

Teaching Strategies

Pre-reading Strategies


        

Recollections of European History

 
What images and memories come to mind from your previous study of Europe and Spain around the end of the Middle Ages? From recollections of art, literature, history, write down your impressions of everyday life, work, and social conditions at the time?
   
  • Who had power?
  • What were the main kinds of political structures?
  • How did governments work?
 

Recalling Images of Columbus

Write a portrait of Columbus from your study of history, from pictures and movies you have seen. Describe him and his compatriots as you recall them. Write what you think were his intentions in sailing west from Europe. 


Identifying the Source

 After doing either or both of the above tasks, identify and discuss the source of your memories and viewpoints. Where did you get these ideas? How accurate do you think your images are?

 

Europe Before the Conquest

 

Life in Fifteenth Century Europe
Not many children lived even to maturity. About half, and not just the poor, died in their first year. If you lived longer, poor diet, disease, and violence threatened to cut life short.
Food supplies were scanty. The usual meal was bread dipped in a thin vegetable soup. To eat fresh meat more than a dozen times a year was very uncommon. Milk, butter, and cheese were too expensive. The family pig was not eaten at home but sold for much-needed cash. The landowners savagely punished poaching for game or fish. If you didn’t starve to death, malnutrition was almost sure to keep you so weak you fell prey to disease.
If disease didn’t get you, violence might. The frequent wars of this period organized violence on a large scale. On their way to and from battle, armies ravaged the countryside. Bandits attacked travelers and held whole villages for ransom. Violence was a poison running through the bloodstream at all levels of society. People were killed casually in quarrels, for cheating in gambling, over malicious gossip, in drinking bouts, and in urban riots.
Milton Meltzer, Columbia and the World around Him, 31

End of the World

15th Century Nativity 
Fifteenth Century Painting of the Nativity
 
To understand the invasion of the lands known to us as the Americas, it is necessary to know something about Europe at the end of the fifteenth century. In many ways it was a place under siege.
 
Most Europeans were far from rich, and their lives were marked by violence, disease, and famine. The belief that the world would end soon was taken quite seriously. In fact, preoccupation with morbid subjects was so great that it was given a name, “the culture of death.”
 
Christopher Columbus concluded, from his extensive study of the Bible and theologians of the time, that Armageddon had a date: it would occur in 1650. There were good reasons for such melancholy.


Death 

 
 Savonarola

      The general devastation was so great that a famous demonic preacher, Savonarola, could say, in 1496:

There will not be enough men left to bury the dead; nor means to dig enough graves.  So many will lie dead in the houses that men will go through the streets crying, “Send forth your dead.”  And the dead will be heaped in carts and on horses; they will be piled up and burnt.  Men will pass through the streets crying aloud, “Are there any dead?  Are there any dead?”

Quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 34

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/savonarola.html

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13490a.htm

 

                                  Violence

Execution of Savonarola

Execution of Savonarola
 
Common folk routinely suffered acts of violence from each other in the form of robberies and murders. Revenge was sweet, especially if it came in the form of a public spectacle. Crowds got perverse enjoyment from watching criminals being tortured and then executed on scaffolds in public squares.

The many different units of society

contending for domination also constantly fought with each other: earldoms, republics, duchies, noble families, and all kinds of factions engaged in “kidnapping, torture, mutilation, fratricide, patricide, assassination, and fomented rebellion” (Sale, 33).

In addition to these battles among themselves, those who had any power at all didn’t hesitate to use it against their disobedient subjects or fellow citizens who had the misfortune of being out of favor. Wars on a large scale were common-place as newly organized nation-states vied for power.

  

   Black Death
Depiction of the Black Death
Disease and Famine

For centuries the Black Death had ravaged the countryside of Europe.  By 1450 the population was just beginning to grow back to its pre-plague levels.  Other epidemic diseases also scourged humanity as a direct result of unsanitary and crowded living conditions, general uncleanliness and ignorance, and the constant waging of wars.

Hundreds of thousands also died every year of hunger during recurrent famines when the main crops of wheat and barley failed.  The landscape was riddled with pestilence, war, and death.  No wonder people whose daily experience was chaotic and dangerous had a preoccupation with death.

http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/

http://history.boisestate.edu/westciv/plague/

 

Constant Warfare, Holy and Otherwise

Crusade at Council of Claremont
 Crusade at the Council of Clermont

Latin Christendom had waged war against Islam for eight hundred years, and portions of Europe, including parts of Spain was still under Islamic control.  The Moors, or Moslems, invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 from North Africa and conquered it in only seven years.  The next seven centuries saw almost constant fighting in what came to be known as the “reconquest.”  The goal of Christians was to expel from their territory not only the Moors but also others who challenged the prevailing version of Catholicism.

 

The Crusades, the series of campaigns fought from 1096 to 1291 to recover the Holy Land from the Moslems, were unsuccessful in their main goal but nevertheless had a powerful impact in that they opened the way to a larger world.  The many nobles, knights, servants, and churchmen who participated returned from their quest with fantastic tales of great cities and lavish stores of consumer goods.

http://www.medievalcrusades.com/

 

…And Despair

Always and everywhere in the literature of the age, we find a confessed pessimism.  As soon as the soul of these men has passed from childlike mirth and unreasoning enjoyment to reflection, deep dejection about an earthly misery takes their place and they see only the woe of life.

Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 138 quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 31

 

 

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