Rhetorical Analysis: The Next Genocide

Edmund Burke once said, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” (“History Quotes” par. 23). There is something to be said about a civilization that does not analyze its past flaws to correct it future mistakes. By not studying the past, both the laudable and the unmentionable, there is no way for a person, country, or race of people to avoid making similar errors as a result of ignorance. Examining history provides each generation with the tools for it to construct its own values, opinions, and solutions to essential humanitarian, political, economic, and social problems. However, sometimes analyzing history is not enough, especially whenever its warnings are largely ignored or underestimated. Thus in his article “The Next Genocide,”

Although there is not that much of an ethos argument directly in the article, the knowledge and intimacy with the topic behind the scenes is. Due to Snyder’s position as a history professor at Yale, it is expected that he is highly educated on modern Eastern Europe, which is his field of expertise. In addition, he has written several other articles and books about the Holocaust in conjunction with teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on this topic. Taught in 2013-2013, two of these classes, Eastern Europe to 1914 and Eastern Europe Since 1914, reinforce the author’s credibility to a history commentary and argument written in 2013. Due to his position as a college professor, the credentials he obtained to become one, and the currency of his teaching at the time of the article, it gives Snyder’s argument more validity due to the gravity behind his

In “The Next Genocide,” Snyder begins with, “Before he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, ‘You must die so that we can live.’ As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us” (Snyder par. 1). The austere illustration of German soldiers massacring innocent Jewish children emphasizes the stark horror and terror of a twisted ideology in the readers’ minds. Such an emotional appeal strengthens Snyder’s argument that pointless bloodshed occurs whenever empiricism is disregarded in favor of fanaticism, creating desperate countries that are willing to commit genocide to sustain themselves. While the horrors of the Holocaust seem a distant memory, the greater terror is that those same factors are still viable reasons for alarm. There are two photos in the article, each proving that natural disasters can exacerbate the conditions leading up to these “ecological panics.” The first one is of three, plain-clothed people stranded in a small boat surrounded by mud (as a result of floods) in a bleak wasteland in Bangladesh; the quality of the photo is foggy and gloomy. The other is of little African children covered in dust and standing in simple clothing on a cracked, arid ground. Both of these pictures appeal to the reader’s sense of injustice, misfortune, compassion, and sorrow. This is