“...Indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor-- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees-- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.” On April 12, 1999, a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Elie Wiesel portrayed the true danger of human indifference while speaking to a large audience in addition to the President and First Lady (Bill and Hillary Clinton respectively), Congress members, and various leaders of other nations. Wiesel describes the tragedies that occurred over the past century, all of the bloodshed that stained human hands. He wove his lexicon beautifully as he spoke of his own pain and misery in the concentration camps and how his liberation by the American troops gave him renewed hope, tearing the hearts of all those listening in; surely Elie …show more content…
To develop this idea, Elie manipulated several varieties of rhetorical trope.
The most common use of rhetoric was conduplicatio, or the repetition of a key concept; obviously the point to be taken was that indifference endangers our humanity. Another device he employed consistently to drive this concept home was hypophora: Mr. Wiesel asks multiple questions about the meaning of indifference, the consequences of indifference, and whether or not indifference is actually necessary before he speculates upon the answers or uses them rhetorically to offer spectators the opportunity to come to their own conclusion, which is typically in agreement with Mr.