Elie Wiesel Rhetorical Analysis

During times of war, mankind's humanity is unknowingly corrupted. Humans are capable of causing suffering by doing nothing - by not interfering with the bad things that happen, self-proclaimed ‘good people’ allow others to undergo misery. Elie Wiesel speaks about the world’s lack of intervention during the Holocaust in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, angry, “that the world did know and remained silent” (Document B), and goes on to explain how, “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (Document B). Wiesel is anguished that so many people stood by and watched as others were systematically murdered by their own government. Citizens that were not persecuted were so terrified

Wiesel uses parallelism in his statement to emphasize just how ineffective inaction is. His two claims, “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim” and, “silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” are essentially the same statement, just reworded to completely attest to how useless being a bystander is. Peoples’ necessity for self-preservation during the Holocaust allowed them to knowingly let millions of others suffer. Though rational, their fear of the Nazis was unnecessary, because if everyone stood up to them, there would be no way to persecute them all. The uselessness of bystanders is further proven by the Bystander Effect, a social phenomenon that claims,“the more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help” (Thomas 2016). One theory as to why this phenomenon occurs is because when there are multiple people present, there is diffusion of responsibility, meaning each person is only partially responsible for resolving the crisis, compared to in a smaller group when everyone has an escalated amount of

Because the event was so public, few actually felt the need to prevent it from happening because there were so many other people there to solve the problem, allowing them to stand idly by and watch the whole thing happen from the comfort and safety of their homes. The dangers of the Bystander Effect are also apparent in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a document created in 1948 by the United Nations as a vow to prevent barbaric acts, such as the Holocaust, from ever recurring and to protect everyone’s most basic rights. Article Three of the declaration states that, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person” (Document G). This means that every single person, regardless of any possible prejudice, is entitled to live their life as a safe, free person. These are the fundamental rights set forth by Enlightenment thinker John Locke in Two Treatises of Government, written in 1689, over 250 years prior to the adoption of the