What is the author's purpose in including the following paragraph in his argument about the dangers of human indifference to suf
fering? 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 Algeria, 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.
A. Wiesel is showing the audience that historical facts are sometimes inaccurate. B. Wiesel is showing the audience times he has suffered from indifference. C. Wiesel is showing examples of times people were not indifferent to suffering. D. Wiesel is showing how widespread the effects of indifference are.
The answer is D: Wiesel is showing how widespread the effects of indifference are.
This excerpt by Eliezer Wiesel, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust and the German concentration camps, is making an argument about how the most heinous horrors during the 20th century are due, in great part, to the indifference of the witnesses of these horrors. His prose is abundant in exemplifying and detailing these horrors, making the argument that they are so widespread that the 20th century will inevitably be severely judged.
