Topic > Elie Wiesel's Use of Rhetoric in The Perils of Indifference

Introduction: Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Boston University professor, spoke during the Millennium Reading Series at the House Bianca on April 12, 1999. The speech, “The Perils of Indifference,” was given by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, addresses the problems of the 20th century and at the same time explains the dangers of indifference. Wiesel's appeals, powerful messages, and arguments to his audience make this speech so effective. Wiesel lived through the hard times of the Holocaust and experienced indifference firsthand. Indifference is the absence of compassion and implies something worse than hatred. Background: He wanted to convey that indifference was worse than hatred or anger. Throughout his speech, he uses the compelling elements of ethos, pathos, and logos to communicate to his audience that empathy makes us human. Elie Wiesel successfully portrays his theories on the dangers of ignorance, adding anaphora and spreading ethos, pathos and logos. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Fifty-four years ago, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains awoke, not far from Goethe's Beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald." Elie Wiesel shows his ethics very well throughout the speech. He started talking about a little story about a little Jewish boy and the interesting thing is that he never specifically mentioned that the little boy he was talking about was himself a professor of humanities at the University of Boston Andrew Mellon since 1976. In 1986 he won numerous awards and recognitions; the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the founding president of the United States Holocaust Memorial by Wiesel, including Night, an autobiography about his experiences in the Holocaust. Although the audience at the Millennium conference was not aware of Wiesel's tragic story after listening to his lecture due to his artistic ethics, they would have understood it. Evidence and Quotations: Wiesel shows pathos very well throughout the speech. Indifference is the greatest tragedy of our modern era. It's all around. The indifferent are cruel and emotionless with their indifference to the pain of others so varied. For example, ignorance, fear, benefit, authority and dominance. People's indifference towards the suffering, torture and murder of other people continues to be a subject of human tragedy. It is the inhumanity of mankind. Wiesel is guilty of indifference to the pain of his fellow men. “So much violence; so much indifference”. Wiesel used logos evoking history in his speech. When he was in the concentration camps he told what happened. He also pointed out how people are not supportive when things happen now. It's like we don't matter. They just stand by and stare at all the bad things. “And now we knew, we learned, we found out that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew.” The purpose of Wiesel's speech is to convince the audience of victims of injustice and cruelty not to become indifferent. The speaker hopes to show compassion for those suffering injustices around the world in the 21st century. He argues that being indifferent to that suffering is what makes human beings inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. “Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that being abandoned by humanity back then was not the final solution. We felt that being abandoned by God was worse than being punished by Him.”.