Answer:
He gave several reasons, among them his belief that secession was unlawful, the fact that states were physically unable to separate, his fears that secession would cause the weakened government to descend into anarchy, and his steadfast conviction that all Americans should be friends towards one another, rather than enemies. But it may have been the last point that he considered the most important to his argument: Secession would destroy the only democracy in existence and prove for all time - to both future Americans and the world - that a government of the people could not survive.
This is a part from Elie Wiesel's Nobel lecture and he is talking about the memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War as Wiesel was a survivor of the Holocaust and the Nazi prosecution. He believes that the past will serve as reminder and a shield so the horrors he and others went through would never repeat.
