Elie Wiesel Injustice

Elie Wiesel, a writer and survivor of the Holocaust, said the above words in 1986 upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel’s words touched upon a common question: How should a country respond to injustice abroad? It is a useful question. The social history of humanity is largely one of bloodshed and hate, only occasionally intersped with triumphs of justice. There has scarcely been a year of history free of one man-made tragedy or another, for all people are capable of bloodlust, of bigotry, of evil. Indeed, there has always been and will always be a substantial portion of the human community that faces the wrath of another portion, and is punished with persecution, exclusion, and, in the most extreme of cases, death. What is interesting is not that in and of itself, but rather how third parties respond—how, on the national scale, a country with knowledge of genocide or another evil in another nation reacts. In 1939, only months before the beginning of the Second World War, 907 Jews, having escaped from likely death in Nazi-led Germany aboard the MS St. Louis, attempted to gain entrance into the United States. If they were to be rejected from the U.S., …show more content…
By denying the refugees of the St. Louis entry, America hid behind the veil of national borders to avoid doing what was right; only when it set aside excuses could it act in accord with simple morality. America must always be committed to the spirit which animated it during the Second World War, must always serve as the final guarantor of human rights for all, their national identity or distance from our own shores irrelevant. For anything less would be a betrayal of the republic at its best and of the country’s finest traditions. Justice, liberty, and equality before the law are the core of the American ethos, and to allow them to be denied to anyone, in any nation, runs counter to all that Americans