Speeches that Changed the World is a collection of inspiring speeches that had a major impact. Elie Wiesel’s speech ‘The perils of indifference’ made a big impact on me.
“On the threshold of a new millennium, what will the legacy of the vanishing century be? Surely it will be judged severely. Two world wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations, bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag, the tragedies of Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.
Indifference is always the friend of the enemy. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once. And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew…
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?”
Looking back on my life, I realize that on too many occasions I have been a wimp and chosen to turn a blind eye to injustice or wrong doing. We reap as we sow and the demise of our civilization is the result of our collective indifference to the way our leaders have been running the world. Now the situation is so bad that we are suffering, our children are suffering and almost certainly our grand children will spit on our graves.