Nobel Peace Prize winner, renowned scholar, and author of over fifty books, Elie Wiesel is a name with worldwide recognition. In addition to his literary and scholarly accomplishments, Wiesel is also recognized as an eminent champion and defender of human rights for both the work he has done in the field, as well as his own status as a Holocaust survivor (“Elie Wiesel”). Wiesel believes indifference, or the lack of sympathy towards others, as being the devastating culprit in dividing humanity. In this rhetorical analysis of Wiesel’s speech “The Perils of Indifference” I will explain how Wiesel uses the concepts of ethos, logos, pathos, and other rhetorical devices to make this a powerful and timeless speech in hopes to eliminate …show more content…
They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.” This shows how disappointed Wiesel was that other people were allowing these types of situations to occur without trying to intervene or help. This exhibits Wiesel’s belief that indifference achieves nothing but disappointment among others. Wiesel tries to instill fear and guilt in the audience when he talks about the future of our children. He questions here how we can let indifference shape the lives of innocent children by saying:
“What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.”
By ending his speech with a statement that is emotionally related to so many different people, it leaves an inevitable impression on the