Perils of Indifference Analysis
Is Ignorance Bliss? Elie Wiesel was victim to one of the most tragic and horrific incidents of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. He was one of few lucky ones who escaped the camps alive, while his family was part of millions who were not so lucky. Years after that, he became a journalist and eventually was convinced to finally write about his experiences with the Holocaust. The result became one of his most famously publicized works. The book, Night (English translation version), only represented the beginning of a flourishing career as a political activist and novelist. He came to the United States and continued writing about his life and political ideologies, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for works that diligently argued for ending oppression, hatred, and racism. Such themes are the underlying basis of his message in his speech The Perils of Indifference. The horrors he faced as a boy forged the man that would go on to write all of these magnificent works; the neglect and ignorance of those events that occurred during the Holocaust influenced and inspired him to warn people of the dangerous woes of indifference. Lecturing an audience for any extended period of time is never an ideal way to convey one’s message effectively. As an experienced and successful novelist, Wiesel was well aware that if he wanted to get people to really understand what he meant when he said “Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger or hatred.”, he couldn’t just talk at his audience, he had to ask questions to engage them. However, questions don’t have to require answers, and in a speech as passionate and carefully articulated as this one, a Q & A every thirty seconds would drown out his point among all of the redundant tangents the conversation could take off in. Instead, Wiesel took the approach of using the figurative devices of asking rhetorical questions and setting up allusions to make his argument relatable, understandable, reliable, and most