indifference. It is entirely sterile.

The speech also makes the point that even a great man like Franklin Delano Roosevelt can have his honor tarnished by indifference to suffering. He refers to the St. Louis, a ship with one thousand Jews on board, which Roosevelt sent back to Nazi Germany. One of the greatest presidents of a great country was still capable of being indifferent to suffering.

Indifference is more dangerous than hatred because it is so much more common, but people can be awoken from a state of indifference and taught to care about each other. This, finally is the message of the speech, and the task it seeks to accomplish. This is why the speech ends with the images of dying children and the message that

Some of them—so many of them—could be saved.

There are several messages that Wiesel conveys in this speech. First of all, he points out that it is always important to remember atrocities and crimes against humanity, rather than the alternative, which is to forget about them because they are unsavory and depressing. It is important to remember, he suggests, so that we don't repeat the same mistakes.

Wiesel's main message, however, is that we should guard against becoming indifferent or desensitized to atrocities and crimes against humanity. It is easy to become indifferent or desensitized when these atrocities and crimes seem to be so frequent, but it is also dangerous. As Wiesel says, indifference "can be tempting" and "seductive," but it is dangerous because it "reduces the Other to an abstraction." In other words, victims of atrocities and crimes can become, through indifference, an idea removed from our reality, rather than fellow humans who are suffering. Arguably, this has happened with gun crime in America today. People have perhaps become desensitized to these crimes because they happen so often and are no longer as shocking as they once were, and with desensitization comes a relative degree of indifference and thus inaction.

Wiesel also highlights the pain caused to victims when other people look on, indifferent, and do nothing to help. He says that the suffering of these victims is intensified if they believe that their fellow humans are indifferent; in this case, the isolation or alienation of the victims becomes quite hopeless.

Quite simply, Elie Wiesel, in his speech "The Perils of Indifference," wants us to know that when someone is indifferent to the suffering of another, he/she is just as guilty as the person causing the suffering. When we stand idly by and do nothing, we become accomplices to a crime against other human beings. During the Holocaust, Jews were marched through towns to concentration camps, and most of the people who saw them watched without any concern for their well being. Actually, many of the local residents taunted them, threw rocks at them, spit on them, and did other horrible things. Neighbors turned their backs on Jewish neighbors and stood indifferently by when the Jewish neighbors were taken away by the Nazis. Wiesel's speech emphasizes that this is how evil takes hold. We are all in this together, and we must stand up to evil wherever it exists.

In short, Wiesel's main point is to praise people who stood up for the victims of the Holocaust and condemn indifference.  Just to be clear, the definition of indifference is the state of lacking any care or concern for a person, place, event, etc.  However, Wiesel wants to make sure especially that his audience understands he is speaking specifically about indifference towards any person who is suffering.

Wiesel (who made his speech on April 12, 1999), praised President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton for their fight against injustice.  Primarily, Wiesel defines indifference and gives the stipulations mentioned in the above paragraph.  Wiesel then mentions, by name, those during the Holocaust who were the  most notorious for the trait of indifference. 

Wiesel poses many questions in his speech, and often asks if the world has less indifference than before.  Wiesel doesn't completely focus on the positive as a result.  He does mention that we approach the new century with "fear," but also with hope.  Indifference, therefore, still exists.  Unfortunately, while it exists, horrid events such as the Holocaust are always possible. Thus, because of indifference, history can repeat itself.

He wanted to convey that indifference is worse than hate or anger. One could be angry at injustice or hate evil, violent acts. Indifference is the absence of compassion and implies something worse than outright hate; indifference implies a lack of acknowledgment. Being indifferent to another's suffering is like saying, 'you're suffering is not even worth my consideration.' Wiesel speaks from his experience of the Holocaust, but this could be applied to any situation in history in which the world was indifferent; in which the world willfully refused to acknowledge suffering of others for any number of unjustifiable reasons: 1) out of sight, out of mind, 2) passivity, laziness, 3) an untried feeling of hopelessness ('what could i possibly do?'), 4) selfishness. When Wiesel speaks of indifference he also means ignorance in 3 senses: 1) ignorant as in lacking sensitivity, 2) lacking knowledge and 3) ignoring.

The 'perils of indifference' could be described as the 'the terrible outcomes of ignoring atrocities. Apply this to anything today, where suffering is ignored by indifferent people and governments. (i.e., Darfur, Haiti). The peril of indifference would be to allow (allow by ignoring = indifference) an atrocity like the Holocaust to occur again.

I agree with akannan's post to your question. I want to add that the kind of indefference that is being discussed by Elie Wiesel is the kind of head turning that the German people did during the early days of Hitler's rise to power and the beginning of the Third Reich. The good German people did nothing to stop Hitler's round-up of German Jewish people into Ghettos or terrorizing the German people in the streets. No one had the stamina or intestinal fortitude to say, "This is wrong."  People were afraid.

A quote is attributed to Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." which I think examplifies the type of "head turning" and silent nod that many have given to genocides in the world around us. We have our own problems, and perhaps, the world's problems are too much for America to handle.  It is a type of rationalization that we use to justify our inaction. However, it does allow the evil to flourish by simply doing nothing.

Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.  (http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm)

I think that in many ways, the expectation is that the persons being victimized will rise up and overthrow the agressor, but in so many liberty/revolution situations, the oppressed need help to overthrow the oppressor. America is seen as the great liberator or the policeman of the world. Our values are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...and we willingly share those values with any who request our aid.

Wiesel draws upon his own experience as a survivor at Buchenwald, one of the Nazi death camps, to prove the argument that American indifference endangers the entire world.  He makes the valid assertion that it was the action of American troops that stopped Hitler, ended the Holocaust, and freed the survivors, like Wiesel himself:  "And now, I stand before you, Mr. President- Commander in Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others- and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American People."  In the speech, Wiesel asserts his belief that indifference ("not caring") would have not freed him from the hell of the Holocaust, and serve to aid the aggressor:

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. 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.

Notice again, the argument being articulated here.  It is not merely the absence of action which is wrong.  It is the fact that absence of action is a silent nod to the aggressor, it is complicity.  The irony of the situation is not lost on a survivor like Wiesel:  America, as well as other nations in the Europe, knew very well what Hitler was proposing, why these nations' indifference to Weimar Germany's struggles enabled Hitler's rise to power, and that the Nazis represented a force of doom to millions of Jewish people and millions others.  It was indifference that caused the Holocaust.

Wiesel concludes by demanding the America exercise the same moral authority it did during the Holocaust, in the situations such as Kosovo or Rwanda.  Indifference or isolationism is not an appropriate response to evil, and Wiesel's argument is that American indifference assists the aggressors or perpetrators of such evil, endangering the entire world.

Elie Wiesel was 15-years-old when he was imprisoned in and eventually liberated from German concentration camps.  He has subsequently spent the next 70 years with one main mission: warning the rest of humanity about the dangers of complacency.  That was the central theme of his April 12, 1999, speech at the White House, The Perils of Indifference, part of the Millenium Lecture Series that featured eminent individuals from myriad fields and walks of life.  Wiesel has born witness not just to the greatest display of human cruelty in history, but to the numerous examples of human cruelty that followed.  The epitaph of the Holocaust has long been “Never Again.”  Never again will the world stand idly by while autocratic regimes systematically exterminate entire peoples.  In his April 1999 speech, however, Wiesel sought to draw to the world’s leaders’ attention their abject failure to abide the admonishment against allowing another mass slaughter carried out on the basis of ethnic or religious differences.  It is for this reason he included in his speech the following recitation of the world’s failures during only one century of humanity’s existence:

“We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations -- Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin -- bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.”

Having listed the most recent instances of mass slaughter, some of which resulted in millions of deaths, Wiesel then begins his discourse on the nature of ambivalence or indifference:

“What is indifference? . . . Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?”

In The Perils of Indifference, Wiesel is appealing to the world’s conscience.  The emotion to which he is most directly appealing is guilt, guilt over the repeated failures of the world’s major industrialized nations to eschew genocidal policies and to take those steps necessary to prevent them.  The debate over whether the United States could have done more to impede Germany’s ability to carry out the mass extermination of Jews and others will likely continue for years to come.  Those examples of genocide that followed, however, allow for no similar uncertainty.  The world knew what was going on in Cambodia, Nigeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ethiopia, and other locales where ethnic conflict and government abuse was going unaddressed or was allowed to continue longer than warranted by any exigent circumstances.  Wiesel’s appeal to the world’s conscience by addressing its moral ambivalence about so many instances of mass slaughter was aimed directly at the concept of guilt. 

I am a great admirer of Elie Wiesel, and I mourn his passing.  His mission was just and his work was important.  He turned his loss and pain into a force for good.  My father liberated a concentration camp. I am Jewish. I share these facts to show that if I had a tendency to be biased about Wiesel's speech, it would be a bias for it, not against it. However, I do not think that this particular speech was effective in its effort to convince us to remember the past to prevent further genocides.

Much of what Wiesel did in this speech was to accuse the world of indifference, most particularly the United States.  He pointed out specific instances of American indifference to the plight of the Jews in Europe. And everything he had to say was factual and justified. 

The problem is, though, I don't think it was necessarily persuasive, at least not to an American audience. I do think this has to do with the American character, which responds best to rhetorical flights of fancy word work, loads of optimism, and ample praise. I suspect many an American tuned him out once he stopped thanking us for rescuing him.  It is a dry speech, really, and Night is far more persuasive a text because it is easier to feel empathy for one person than for six million. 

Honestly, I do not know how we persuade people in the world to remember and not repeat these horrific genocides. So many people seem to want to forget, and there is that whole subset of people who insist the Holocaust never even happened.  Soon, most survivors of the Holocaust will be gone, and it is clear today that a substantial number of people remain indifferent, to women, to LGBTGs, to immigrants, to African-Americans, to the poor. I hope that the up and coming generation is motivated somehow to take a "Never Again" stance.   

I think that the arguments presented in Wiesel's speech are highly logical and force democratic societies that stand for freedom and tolerance to examine their own policies and predispositions.  For example, when Wiesel criticizes America of the 1930s for silence, it is a logical analysis of American intervention in the war.  The mythic retelling of American entry into World War II was to stand for democracy and freedom, whose antithesis was present in the form of Hitler and the Nazis.  Yet, Wiesel points to FDR's and the government's silence to the problem, even rejecting Jewish refugees who escaped from death only to be sent back to it.  The idea of demanding voice in the face of injustice and resisting silence and indifference as paths if one believes in freedom is of critical importance and logically made in Wiesel's speech.  At the time of his writing, the ethnic cleansing happening in Rwanda and the war crimes perpetrated in the former Yugoslavian republic were moments where the United States had to reexamine its own position towards these and the points made in Wiesel's speech help to resolve any potential inaction that one might feel would be an appropriate course:  "Indifference is not a response... it is a sin."

The original question had to be edited down.  I would say that the base subject matter of Wiesel's speech is the how the ethical position of indifference is tantamount to perpetrating cruelty.  Wiesel makes the point that indifference, not caring, "emboldens the aggressors."  For Wiesel, the subject matter of the speech is to examine the ethical implications of indifference.  In his reference to the Holocaust, Wiesel suggests that indifference was of significant importance to the Holocaust.  Wiesel suggests that "In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman."  For Wiesel, the subject matter of the speech is to explore this idea in how indifference can be an ethically worse position than something like anger.  In Wiesel's speech, the subject matter is related to how indifference is not an appropriate response to genocides all over the world.  It is in Wiesel's experience with the Holocaust where indifference was seen in its worst capacity.  The indifference with which President Roosevelt turned away Jewish refugees, or the indifference with which others turned away from those who suffered and died during the Holocaust becomes the base subject matter of the speech.