Rhetorical Analysis of The Perils of Indifference by Elie Wiesel

As part of the Millennium Lecture Series hosted by the White House, notable author, Noble Peace Prize Winner, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel delivered the speech The Perils of Indifference on April 12, 1999. He delivered this speech in order to inspire the American people to take action in times of human suffering, injustice, and violence, in order to prevent events like the Holocaust from happening again in the future. Through the use of the modes of persuasion, his rhetorical situation, and word choice, Wiesel successfully appeals to his audience of President Clinton and his wife, the members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, his “excellencies” and the rest of the American public. Wiesel’s main point in his speech is that of indifference and what can come about because of it. In order to successfully define indifference to the audience and persuade them to never be indifferent in the future, Wiesel defines its etymology, as “no difference” and uses numerous comparisons on what may cause indifference, as “a strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur” in circumstances like light and dark and good and evil. To prove that indifference is both a sin and a punishment, Wiesel appeals to logos and ethos, stating that he is aware of how tempting it may be to be indifferent and that it can be easier to avoid something rather than take action against it. He believes that indifference benefits the aggressor and the enemy, and not the victim, who feels more and more pain when one feels he or she is forgotten. In his speech, Wiesel questions as to why people did not take action during this time, especially President Roosevelt, who he believed to be a good man with a good heart who was able to understand the people in need of help, by asking “Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark?”. He states, “I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?”. The key component used in Wiesel’s speech is that of one of Aristotle’s modes of persuasion: pathos. As a Holocaust survivor, Wiesel is obviously extremely passionate about the events that have happened over half a century ago. Throughout the duration of his speech, he continuously appeals to pathos for different purposes. He starts off his speech with a third-person anecdote of himself as a child, recently freed from being imprisoned in a concentration camp. He says that he “was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again” as well as “he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion”. Using an appeal to pathos and speaking in third-person at the same time, Wiesel successfully is able to grab the audience’s attention as well as elicit emotion out of them, making them easily persuaded by the things he will say in the remainder of his speech. At the end of his speech, Wiesel appeals to human emotion by questioning the fate of children. He pleads that the public sees and reads about the children, and does so with a broken heart. “Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably,” he exclaims, “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. Some of them – so many of them – could be saved”. By using this example of the children, as well as stating that it can be avoided and they can be saved, Wiesel is successfully eliciting emotion out of the audience and at the same time persuading them to not let something like this happen again, and to act when they have these broken hearts. Furthermore, as a Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel also holds a huge amount of credibility, and therefore appeals to ethos. Because of this, it is not difficult for the audience to immediately want to believe what he says and be on his side. As someone who has experienced exactly what the “perils of indifference” may be, Elie Wiesel is the perfect person to be delivering a speech about it and the perfect person people should want to be persuaded by. Throughout his speech he successfully appeals to ethos by using specific points and anecdotes from the events of the Holocaust. For instance, he discusses the “Muselmanner”, or the “most tragic of all prisoners” in Auschwitz. He recalls how they would sit on the ground with torn blankets staring “vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were”. Using a memory like that as well as stating ways he and others would be “miserably consoled” at the time helps build himself as a credible source for this. At the same time, his anecdotes still appeal to pathos as well, because his audience feels his pain as he describes these events that make him so credible. Wiesel’s use of ethos goes hand in hand with his use of pathos, being that all of his usage of pathos stems from his credibility of being a part of the Holocaust and experiencing these traumatic experiences, which provide him to be passionate in his speech and about this topic. The rhetorical situation of this speech is simple to figure out, and Wiesel uses it throughout the speech. The act of his speech, which is the agency, is that he wants the audience to be influenced to not be indifferent of any tragic event. The agent is that, as stated, he is credible because he survived the Holocaust and that is what he is speaking of. The scene of this speech is that of being a part of the Millennium Lecture Series at the White House. The theme of this was to “Honor the past – Imagine the future”. Elie Wiesel was chosen to deliver a speech of this kind in order to discuss events of the past and how acting a certain way and being knowledgeable about them, one can impact the way the future will pan out, and in this case, chose whether or not to be indifferent. He effectively states his purpose through the rhetorical stases, and the audience easily is able to determine what that is. Finally, Elie Wiesel uses a lexical field in his word choice. He uses strong words that are able to elicit emotion as well as the feeling of tragedy from the audience. Throughout his speech, he continuously uses words such as “joy,” “grateful,” “rage,” “compassion,” “abandoned,” and “traumatic” in order to grab the attention and emotion of the audience. Doing so, he is able to persuade them into agreeing with him that to be indifferent is to be on the same side of the enemy. Elie Wiesel successfully appeals to his audience in The Perils of Indifference. Through the use of his rhetorical situation, modes of persuasion, as well as word choice, the audience is easily able to understand and agree with his views on indifference. “…Together we walk towards the new millennium,” he says, “carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope”. Not only is this an extremely inspiring and moving speech, but also thought-provoking as well as effective. Since this speech was delivered the White House as well as the general public of America has not let anything remotely like the Holocaust happen, and has been far from indifferent in the world’s events.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ewieselperilsofindifference.html