Elie Wiesel’s “The Perils of Indifference” Speech
Elie Wiesel, a Noble Peace Prize winner and Boston University Professor, presented a speech as part of the Millennium Lecture Series at the White House on April 12, 1999. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton hosted the formal lecture series. Numerous dignitaries from a wide array of public, private and foreign office attended the event. Although Elie Wiesel designed his speech to persuade, it actually fell somewhat outside the deliberative genre category, as being more non-typical within this genre category.
The speech is unique in a way that cascades it into a genre classification considered as a hybrid deliberative genre. Wiesel produces this hybrid genre by bending or incorporating several different genres within the main speech while he attempts to persuade the audience. While the speech looks to the past, its main points focus on the future. Wiesel produces this hybrid genre by blending or fusing additional elements or traits from other genres such as forensic and epideictic. These factors coupled with a multitude of discourse elements woven within the speech such as an autobiography, historical narrative, along with the use of storytelling, tied within the confines of a jeremiad, which includes religious rhetoric, culminates into an extraordinary epideictic address. This paper will analyze these elements in order to draw a distinct correlation to the hybrid deliberative genre theory.
Wiesel’s speech, persuasive in nature, was designed to educate his audience as to the violence and killing of innocent people across the globe. Wiesel spoke of acts that had taken place throughout his lifetime, from his youth, up through present day atrocities. His focu...
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...erfections presented by indifference (Matza, 2013).
Works Cited
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Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp Elie experiences numerous events that challenges his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore. At a conference in 1986 Elie explains “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference”. (Elie Wiesel), meaning that opposite of love is not hate, it’s getting used to use to the situation, to the point that the person doesn’t care whether what is happening is right or wrong. In the novel Elie experience physical, mental, and spiritual pain, that test his humanity and morality.
His emphasis was definitely on the pathos portion of the appeal triangle. He tells stories about himself and his suffering to lure everyone in to listen to what he has to say. Towards the middle of the speech, he shares his own sadness about the anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death. Wiesel also shares his deep gratitude towards Roosevelt. He also expresses his gratitude to the audience and especially President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton. Wiesel says that he does not throw the word “gratitude” around lightly; that word really means a lot to him. In exact words, “and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.” This statement pulls in the audience and makes them a little
Since the publication of, Night by Eliezer Wiesel, the holocaust has been deemed one of the darkest times in humanity, from the eradication of Jewish people to killing of innocents. Wiesel was one of the Jewish people to be in the holocaust and from his experience he gave us a memoir that manages to capture the dark side of human nature in the holocaust. He demonstrates the dark side of human nature through the cruelty the guards treat the Jews and how the Jews became cold hearted to each other. Wiesel uses foreshadowing and imagery, and metaphors to describe these events.
Within the next few years, Wiesel’s simple Jewish life is snatched from his clutch and never seen again, the first crack in the glass of his fragile being. His humanity stripped from him and his mother and sister Tzipora taken, Wiesel becomes jaded and angered with his God. He became an “accuser, God the accused” (Wiesel 68), he could no longer think or speak of God without a question to follow it. One can feel powerful once he denounces his God. It is as if a veil is lifted and suddenly he can see.
eliebio.htm>. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. " Elie Wiesel. " Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Throughout the speech, Wiesel utilizes a wide range of tones and uses strategic pauses so the audience experiences no difficulties in understanding the struggle he went through. In one of his more intense moments of the speech, he begins talking about how much worse being ignored was, versus being unjustly judged. Religion may be unjust, but it is not indifferent. People cannot live “Outside God” (Wiesel), they need Him even if He is far away.
From being a bystander of bullying to committing murder are many ways of being indifferent. It is everywhere in everyday life in prospering countries and in poor and destroyed countries. Elie Wiesel knows how indifference feels and how it affects people. He was also indifferent and regrets what he did to this day. He was a victim of the Holocaust and lived through indifference. During his imprison ship he saw indifference everywhere in the camps. How he treated his father is what he regrets. He just cared about himself because another prisoner told him to. He believes his father died because he did not help him all he could. His whole book could be based on indifference if you interpreted it that way. From how the guards treated the prisoners to how kids including Elie treated their own parents. Indifference is a very big topic and a part of Night. Indifference is what pushed him to write his descriptive, emotional, strong, and outstanding novel.
In “The Perils of Indifference” Elie Wiesel uses several techniques to get his point across. Three of them in the speech are Ethos, Repetition, and Pathos. He uses a combination of the three elements throughout the paragraphs of his speech to attract the readers. The combination of these elements help draw the reader’s emotions and interest towards his subject. He focuses on word choice that would pertain to his audience’s level of vocabulary.
Having an opinion and or a belief is better than not having one at all. A great man such as Elie Wiesel would agree to that statement. He believes standing up for what is right by showing compassion for a fellow human being than for letting good men do nothing while evil triumphs. The message he passes was how indifference is showing the other man he is nothing. He attempts to grasp the audience by personal experiences and historic failures, we need to learn from and also to grow to be the compassionate human being we all are.
Along with rhetorical appeals, Wiesel also uses many rhetorical devices such as parallelism and anaphora. Wiesel depicts parallelism when he says, “to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler” (Wiesel lines 103-104). The parallelism and anaphora, in the quote, provide emphasis on the discrimination and abuse that has taken place around the world. Repeating the same initial phrase shows the significance of the words Wiesel is speaking. Wiesel mentions the victims of this extreme tragedy when he states,” for the children in the world, for the homeless for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society.” (Wiesel lines 17-19). This use of anaphora and parallelism emphasize the amount of people the Holocaust has affected and impacted. The parallelism being used adds value to his opinions and balances the list of people Wiesel is making in his speech.
Wiesel appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos in Night. The reader’s logic is not so much directly appealed to, but indirectly the description of the events causes the reader to...
Throughout the speech, Elie Wiesel makes clear his appreciation for America and President Reagan: “We are grateful to this country, the greatest democracy in the world, the freest nation in the world, the moral Nation, the authority in the world.” Firstly, Wiesel wishes to appease the American public: He establishes that he is grateful for America’s humanity and compassion and uses an apposition to underscore America’s greatness. In other words, Wiesel concedes that America has done much, but he then continues with a refutation: “But, Mr. President, I wouldn’t be the person I am, and you wouldn’t respect me for what I am, if I were not to tell you also of the
Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish people’s outlook on life. Wiesel’s identity transformed dramatically throughout the narrative. “How old he had grown the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.