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Wiesel's Speech On Indifference

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Wiesel starts his speech by recounting an experience from his childhood. He opens his speech with “Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up…” Through reciting a narrative in a third person voice, he stylistically frames his argument on indifference. Wiesel admonishes those who chose to “look away from victims” because in not “offering them a spark of hope”, we are betraying our own. Due to the positive social reforms the President is undertaking, he is filled with gratitude. He supports the President’s choice to circumvent indifference and help children, the homeless, and “the victims of injustice”. In his narratio, he explains the dangers and different point of views on indifference. Indifference according to Wiesel is worse than hatred and anger because it “elicits no response”. Words can …show more content…

He questions why the United States, a great democracy and Roosevelt, a man with a good heart did not help the refugees. He does not understand why “the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history” was so indifferent to those in pain. This serves as his confirmatio. It proves his case of ignoring those in need of help and not willing to help because it is easier to “avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes”. At the same time, he feels hopeful for the future because of “the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims”. To make his case stronger, he uses confutatio to refute opposing arguments. He deliberately states why one would be tempted to fall into indifference. “It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair.” The addition of a refutation only makes his argument

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What would you do if someone questioned your every thought or action without even providing evidence why? In the story Doubt written by John Patrick Shanley, Father Flynn is accused of seducing a student by Sister Aloysius. I believe that Father Flynn is innocent of the accused acquisitions. Father Flynn continually sticks to his story. He claims that he only tired to help Donald as he was troubled and needed a friend to talk with.

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Elie Wiesel enlightens his audience of the injustice Roosevelt submitted Jewish refugees to. Wiesel exclaims that he doesn't not understand if, "Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart." Wiesel questions the indifference in the president of the free world and why he didn't allow these refugees into the country. If Wiesel had not presented this information to his audience about the root and extreme problem of indifference in the country, do you think people would have realized just how terrible the problem is and how neglectful we are of our

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Being the last sentence of the book, and out of all the passages I highlighted this one stood out to me and described Wiesel’s experience in just a few simple sentence. He looked at himself for the first time in many years, and did not recognize himself he saw a different person. This showed me that the concentration camps changed him he was a different person inside and out. The events that occurred to him had scared him so much that the man he saw in the mirror wasn’t him, but one who had been drained of life that looked lifeless from the events occurred in the concentration camps. He was weak and this whole passage embodies his weakness and the whole point of the concentration camps.

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I believe that Mr. Wiesel was trying to put forth the ideas that if you don’t try to make a difference, the world will never change for the better. We should all do our upmost to make our world a better, and more improved place for our youth to

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When Wiesel said, “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. (115)” it revealed how little there was left of him after the camps.

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The entire world was so ignorant to such a massacre of horrific events that were right under their noses, so Elie Wiesel persuades and expresses his viewpoint of neutrality to an audience. Wiesel uses the ignorance of the countries during World War II to express the effects of their involvement on the civilians, “And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent when and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation” (Weisel). To persuade the audience, Elie uses facts to make the people become sentimental toward the victims of the Holocaust. Also, when Weisel shares his opinion with the audience, he gains people onto his side because of his authority and good reputation.

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In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel strives to inform his audience of the unbelievable atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent them from ever again responding to inhumanity and injustice with silence and neutrality. The structure or organization of Wiesel’s speech, his skillful use of the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos, combined with powerful rhetorical devices leads his audience to understand that they must never choose silence when they witness injustice. To do so supports the oppressors. Wiesel’s speech is tightly organized and moves the ideas forward effectively. Wiesel begins with humility, stating that he does not have the right to speak for the dead, introducing the framework of his words.

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It becomes clear that Elie Wiesel`s commentary on human nature is that, during extreme circumstances, people are selfish and would achieve anything for their own survival. Furthermore, In Wiesel’s novel people strived to survive this injustice. For example, the Holocaust caused countless amount of

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Indifference need to be gain awareness and be stopped. He develops his claim by narrating the dangers of indifference, and how it affected his life then, describes how wrongful it is to be treated in such a way. Finally Wiesel illustrates examples of how indifference affected the world. Wiesel’s purpose is to inform us about the dangers of indifference in order to bring change about it. He establishes a straightforward tone for the president, ambassadors, politicians, and congressmen.

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Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril. Wiesel commenced the speech with an interesting attention getter: a story about a young Jewish from a small town that was at the end of war liberated from Nazi rule by American soldiers. This young boy was in fact himself. The first-hand experience of cruelty gave him credibility in discussing the dangers of indifference; he was a victim himself.

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When one thinks of the phrase ‘solitary confinement’, a mental image of a dark, damp, small room that one person is forced to stay in without interaction is normally the one invoked. Often, such a thought comes with a hint of fear because it is well known how one can become objectively insane without proper interaction. In the book Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, the author uses complex scenes balancing light and dark and mentions light vs dark almost constantly to invoke this fear within the readers and convey how necessary friendship is to survival. In fact, one of the major themes in the novel is that of loneliness and dejection, which she highlights through the common mention of light equating to life and life to happiness. Alternatively,

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In the speech, titled “The Perils of Indifference,” Elie Wiesel showed gratitude to the American people, President Clinton, and Mrs. Hillary Clinton for the help they brought and apprised the audience about the violent consequences and human suffering due to indifference against humanity (Wiesel). This speech was persuasive. It was also effective because it conveyed to the audience the understanding of

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The characterization of Moshie and Mrs. Shachter shows the indifference and denial of the Jews of Sighet. The chilling juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape containing a camp of death illustrates how the world not only was indifferent to the inhumane suffering, but also continued to shine brightly as if nothing really mattered. This timeless theme of denial and its consequences during the Holocaust echoes the struggles of those in our time who are persecuted solely due to their beliefs. The reader takes away the important lesson of never turning away from those who need it greatest, each time one reads Elie Wiesel’s memoir,

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In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.

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Elie Wiesel Rhetorical Speech Analysis Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor and winner of a Nobel peace prize, stood up on April 12, 1999 at the White House to give his speech, “The Perils of Indifference”. In Wiesel’s speech he was addressing to the nation, the audience only consisted of President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, congress, and other officials. The speech he gave was an eye-opener to the world in his perspective. Wiesel uses a variety of rhetorical strategies and devices to bring lots of emotion and to educate the indifference people have towards the holocaust. “You fight it.

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