REHUGO 2: Speech

Shelly Kaur

Mr. Soeth

English 3 AP

February 1, 2011

REHUGO- History: Speech

A. "The Perils of Indifference" is a speech given by Elie Wiesel on April 12, 1999.

B. Elie Wiesel gave this speech in the East Room of the White House as part of the Millennium Lecture series hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In this speech he shares his feelings of despair from the Holocaust. As a child, Wiesel and his family were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp where the Nazis treated them cruelly. After being liberated by American Troops in April 1945, he has been honored with awards such as the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. With this speech, Wiesel gave the audience the image of the "children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity" (Hillary Clinton). Through the speech, he wants the society to think about the cruelty of the past and hope for a brighter future.

C. The speech is effective through the tone and its audience. The tone is harsh yet appreciative at different points. When Wiesel questions the audience to why there has been indifference and no one stopped the cruel actions, the harsh tone is evident. However, when he respects America for liberating the victims, his tone is appreciative. The audience of this speech also makes it effective in that he addresses people in the White House that would make decisions for the country in the future. By addressing them, he expects them to reflect on the past actions and make the right decisions in the future. The relevance of the speech today is that it is one of the major pieces discussed at school. His book Night is read by students to learn more about the Holocaust and its results. Also, after September 11, 2001, racism increased against certain ethnicities. People would have different views upon a specific race. In addition, the security got very strict and many new policies came about when traveling by airplane. At airports, random selections started where a certain race passenger would be picked to inspect personally. These passengers were chosen because they were suspects because of their race but justified the action as a "random selection." This relates with the Holocaust period where there was racism against the Jews.

D. Rhetorical Strategies

In his speech, Elie Wiesel uses the rhetorical strategy of narration to enhance the effectiveness. He tells the audience about when he was young and taken into concentration camps for being Jews. He mentions that the prisoners "wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it" (Paragraph 7). This narration that Wiesel brings up in the speech depicts the life of the Jews during the Holocaust. The struggle that they went through made them unaware of life and humanity itself. The use of narration as a rhetorical strategy in this speech is effective in appealing to the audience's emotions. In the narration, the imagery of all the cruel ways that the victims had to live through makes it more clear for the audience to visualize the situations. With this visualization, emotions rise that make the audience understand the Holocaust period. With the effectiveness of narration through emotions, the audience is more likely to understand Wiesel's expressed despair given in the speech.

Another rhetorical strategy used by Elie Wiesel in the speech is repetition. This is evident when he repeatedly mentions "indifference." Wiesel points out that "to be indifferent to [the] suffering is what makes the human being inhuman" (Paragraph 9). "Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy" (Paragraph 10). In this context, to be indifferent is to lack concern. With the repetition of "indifference," Wiesel is repeatedly bringing it across to the audience that people lacked concern for the Jews when they were being treated inhumanely. He repeatedly asks "[why] the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?" (Paragraph 16) and "[how] is one to explain their indifference?" (Paragraph 17) The effectiveness of this rhetorical strategy is that it asks the audience's conscious that when the cruelty was going on, how could there be people that would not care to prevent it? It makes the society realize that when an evil occurs, actions must be taken to stop it instead of just being indifferent.