Essay Options for Your Final 5-Page Essay
Choose One
Using the Toulmin model, write a 5-page essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Elie Wiesel's Night eradicates the philosophical notion of theodicy (the reconciliation of an all-loving, all-powerful God to the existence of evil).
Using the Toulmin model, write a 5-page essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Night bears moral witness to the truth and points to "freedom from the prison" and this moral agency gives Night its value. Some however would argue that the evil evident in the book compels us to embrace a nihilistic worldview.
In a 5-page Toulmin model essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the question if Hitler and his minions were crazy sociopaths or sane evil agents.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
What is the stunning achievement of Night?
The book gives us a picture of unspeakable evil, a teenage boy’s firsthand account of the Holocaust, one that some people cannot comprehend or believe.
This is "evil off the grid" that cannot be explained with words or exposition. Rather, we need a narrative, a rendering, a showing of evil.
In other words, Wiesel has done the impossible: He's used words to describe the unspeakable.
Through this first-person narrative, we experience the horror of loss and evil as seen through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy, a boy who, before being taken away to a concentration camp, believes in the wisdom of his father and the justice of God.
These beliefs are challenged, or rather abolished, as Wiesel sees evil take over the world in the face of a silent God. He sees a world surrendering to evil as his father, an image of strength, can only watch on helplessly.
Another achievement of the book is the way it makes us examine the nature of evil. We often attempt to reduce evil to a theory to create the illusion of control but in reading Night we see that evil has an element of mystery that is unexplainable.
Many people want to explain evil, reduce it to a scientific explanation because they can't accept evil, they can't accept an evil force and because they want to further their own theory as part of their self-interest.
Night the memoir is not a theory about evil; it’s a boy’s experience of evil, an evil of such magnitude that his faith is changed forever. He recreates the ordeal of going through evil no one could have imagined and what this ordeal did to his faith.
Night Is a Necessary Book Because to This Day There Are Those Who Deny the Holocaust.
Book Consulted: Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
One. The Doctrine of the Deniers
Six million Jews did not die.
The German state did not have a policy to exterminate Jews with the gas chambers
Legit, mainstream historians are “revisionists,” those who rewrite history to push an agenda, the “pro-Jew” agenda.
The Jews invented the lie of the Holocaust to use their victimization as a power play over others.
Two. Anticipating the Deniers
After World War II during the liberation of those imprisoned in the concentration camps General Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw that people would deny or not believe the horrors of the Holocaust so he ordered a gathering of evidence and documentation in every conceivable way.
Eisenhower knew that cynics would dismiss the Holocaust in part by saying “the winners write history but it’s not an accurate history.”
Three. What Is History?
There are three types or “tiers” according to Michael Shermer.
Historical Objectivity, Historical Relativism, Historical Science.
First Tier: Historical Objectivity, let the facts speak for themselves and do no interject opinion. It consists of 7 principles:
- History exists outside the minds of historians.
- Historians discover the past as astronomers discover the cosmos.
- Historians can know and describe the past.
- Historians can be unbiased.
- One historical event leads to another in a series of cause and effect.
- Historians can discover this cause and effect objectively.
- Historians must show the past “as it actually happened.”
According to Shermer, the problem with the first tier is it denies something called interpretation. You simply don’t just record events. You must interpret them. The first tier woefully ignores this fact. Because we are always interpreting events, the first tier DOES NOT EVEN EXIST. IT’S A MYTH.
The Second Tier: Historical Relativism, the Seven Principles
- History only exists in the minds of historians.
- Historians construct the past the way a sculptor constructs a figure out of marble.
- Historians construct the past with partial documentation that always gives only a partial, incomplete, and therefore unreliable history.
- Historians can never purge themselves of bias, unconscious or otherwise.
- There is no logical cause and effect between contingent historical events.
- Historians impose their own causal structure on history to give themselves the illusion of order.
- Historians cannot show history; only one flawed interpretation of it. Therefore, one version of history is just as valid as the next one. All versions of history are valid, which means none are.
Problems with the Historical Relativism Approach.
If relativism is true, we can know nothing, and if we can know nothing, then communication is stupid, feeble, and not worth trying.
If nothing can be known, then there is no meaning, only nihilism, the belief that our existence amounts to nothing.
The historical relativist suffers a paradox: As soon as he “makes history,” he contradicts his belief that there can be no real history. He has in effect admitted the futility of his own mission.
The Third Tier: Historical Science, the Seven Principles
- History exists both outside and inside the heads of historians.
- Historians both discover and describe the past the way a natural scientist discovers and describes natural phenomena.
- Historians can discover and describe a defined portion of the past through the available data.
- Since historians will always be partly biased, the real question is the quality and degree of the bias. By what methods and with what evidence do scientists arrive at a particular conclusion? And in what cultural context? And with whose funds?
- The past does have a causal structure that we can see with scientific evidence.
- Recognizing the objective nature of discovery and the subjective nature of description, historians can discover and describe the causal structure.
- Historians’ job is to present this past as provisional interpretation of “what actually happened” based on current available evidence , much as natural scientists do with evidence from the natural world.
It is only this final tier, the historical one, according to Shermer, that is legit and without contradictions.
Using Historical Science to Authenticate the Holocaust
We have a “convergence of evidence” that shows the Holocaust really did exist. This evidence includes:
- Written documents.
- Eyewitness testimony
- Photographs
- The camps themselves
- Inferential evidence: population demographics, for example.
The Conditions That Pointed to the Extermination Camps Many Years Before
Nazis developed sterilization and euthenasia programs in the 1930 targeting undesirables. They also used secret murder and deportation as tools to get rid of undesirables.
Student Eric Peterson
Professor: McMahon
English 1A-Section 6373
4 March 2012
Night by Elie Wiesel
Denial and Acclimation to Evil
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, we are very painfully reminded to the core and fiber of our very being that there are many ways in which human beings cave in to both denial and acclimation to evil and we can learn from this both profound and powerful lessons of life and human nature itself. It begins with Wiesel questioning his ability to use language to convey to the readers that which he had witnessed and came to accept as the darkest zone of man and he states that others will never truly understand (Wiesel Preface ix). Even as the book Night officially begins in the first unnamed chapter, the Jewish people in the village did not believe what Moishe the Beadle tried so desperately to tell them (Cengage Enotes). Another way we see Elie Wiesel himself manifest denial was the fact that he himself did not see the entire picture of the facts that not only did Hitler and his accomplices war on all Jews, but also on the Gypsies, the disabled, the Slavic people, the Communists, the Socialists, the African Germans, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the homosexuals (Wiesel Preface viii). Not only do we see Elie Wiesel’s denial, but we see this denial of what was really happening to all of them in a form of groupthink. After all, this process did not occur in just one moment or even in just one day, but transpired over a period of years and began with the cool and calculating manipulation of a puppet master who knew how to use situations to turn long time neighbors against one another. Those of us who have experienced large measures of dysfunction and denial in our own families and communities can both empathize and identify with the progression of denial, division, and evil creep starting with Elie Wiesel, his father, and the members of their entire Jewish community. What is the powerful lesson we learn from human history of what denial and acclimation to evil has done and has the potential to do in our own lives, families, and communities?
At the very beginning of the book Night, Elie Wiesel tells us the readers that he knows he must bear witness to what he experienced and saw and yet at the same time he confesses to the very limitations he had and that he simply did not have the words to say and he felt and still feels helpless over the limitations of language (Wiesel Preface ix). Even as a survivor years after the holocaust, the very raw and primitive horror Wiesel must have felt during his recollections made it easier and more convenient to document transending sentences which wandered on the outer perimeter of the core horrors of the holocaust. One may ask if perhaps I am being too critical of Wiesel, for after all it was he who experienced this and it was he who found the courage to tell all the people of what happened. I feel that in order to truly reach the core reasons that this evil was allowed to continue so long, I must encourage the reader to also look at his role, as Wiesel must look at his, and I at mine. Since Roman times have politicians found clever catch phrases and crowd soothing placating words to speak as great orators, allowing thousands of wonderful thought provoking words to come out to dance around the core issues and distract the undisciplined minds from true events which are transpiring as they listen to the soothing words. Was it the enemy who betrayed and perverted the words, or was it us the people who allowed it to come to this level with barbed wire outside of our windows and armed guards preventing us from leaving our homes and neighborhoods, after taking and selling our wedding rings and personal things? A man I knew who was a homeless rock cocaine addict and a telemarketer for the National Veterans Foundation told me before of the power of both the spoken and written word, for it was those words which brought a ray of truth into the darkest concrete prison cell in which a strong mind was trapped for part of a human lifetime. Interestingly, even today in American cities, the narcotics flood the streets and bodies of addicts as the gas flooded the lives of the people inside of the German chambers.
And so begins the book Night in the first unnamed chapter, the man in their community who first saw the truth of what was happening is called Moishe the Beadle, and the fourth sentence refers indirectly to Moishe the Beadle being the only one liked among the poor in Transylvania (Wiesel 3). This fact alone provokes thought about the various mindsets of the locals in Wiesel’s childhood town and how seriously they took the lives and words of those who were transients and considered to be of a lesser class. This raises serious questions about the very beginnings of “evil creep” (McMahon Breakthrough Writer) and the ways in which it had already pervaded the Jewish community in Transylvania, “As a rule, our townspeople, while they did help the needy, did not particularly like them” (Wiesel3). By in fact already having an attitude of the needy or poor not being particularly liked, this is a fundamental core issue which must be acknowledged, for although Moishe the Beadle was more accepted than the other so called needy, this is strong evidence that there was already a bias among the Jewish community. I can see parallels to this on both our campus and in our community, there is bias toward persons who are poor, those who do not fit in, and the disabled. Typically in the early mornings on the bus bench kitty corner from Mc Donald’s on Crenshaw, there are usually two to four persons who by all appearances do not have regular access to a shower or clean clothes. Busses pass right by not bothering to stop. Even I can do little more than say hello on occasion as I continue passing on by them and their bus bench. Moishe de Beadle and Elie become close, and it is due to this that Elie has a more intimate relationship with Moishe. Moishe is expelled with the other foreign-born Jews, and by a miracle he returns to Sighet to tell the Jews that all those who were expelled have been killed, and he is treated as a raving mad-man, a more outward sign of the villagers denial and acclimation to evil.
Another way we see Elie Wiesel himself manifest denial in the book Night is demonstrated by the fact that he himself did not see the entire picture of not only was he Elie not completely seeing but also of all of the other groups additional to the Jews which Hitler and his accomplices waged war against. To quote the last paragraph (Wiesel viii), “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” The facts are that not only was the Holocaust the systematic, state sponsored persecution and murder of about six million Jews by Nazis and their collaborators, there were also at least five million other human beings who were also persecuted, killed, and deported. During the Holocaust era, the Nazis also went after others and among them were the Gypsies, the disabled, certain Slavic peoples, African Germans, the Communists, the Socialists, Jehova’s Witnesses, and homosexuals (Ushm.org). Soon after WWII officially began Sept 1 of 1939 with German planes bombing Warsaw, Poland surrendered, the troops then entered Warsaw September 28, 1939. A young Catholic social worker named Irena Sendler used her network of contacts
to sneak as many children and babies out of the Warsaw ghetto as she could (Rubin 3-13). This is evidence that so many persons of all types of backgrounds showed solidarity with the Jewish people in their fight to overcome the Nazi tyranny. It was indeed about his personal war as a member of the Jewish people against the Nazi regime, but at the same time I truly feel that Wiesel should have taken more page space to include the struggle of other human beings additional to the Jews against not only the Nazi regime but evil itself.
Not only do we see some evidence of Elie Wiesel’s denial, but we see this denial of what was in fact happening to all of the Jewish people in the form of groupthink, after all this process did not occur in just one moment or even in just one day, but transpired over a period of years with the cool and calculating manipulations of Hitler the puppet master. The voice of a man who survived as a child
violently torn from all he knew rearranges everything he ever thought he knew into the new truth of self and peers allowing evil to pervade their very homes and thoughts and to completely take over control of their lives is raised with the clarity of a bell in a clear and placid harbor. A great contributor to this groupthink of the Jewish people was the political structure not just of Hungary or Austria Hungary but the govorning, which was divided between democracy and constitutional authoritarianism where Wiesel and his people lived. Poland is where the Germans began bombing in 1939, and although industrialization had began there, the power structure was of the feudal houses, the middle class entrepeneurs who attempted to take over, and the authoritarian churches (Eschenburg 1). Hungary was considered part of the second zone where the heritage of absolutism survived. Elie Wiesel had met Moishe the Beadle in 1941 (Wiesel 3) which was when the place they were in was under the political power of Hungary which had been granted by Germany and Fascist Italy for political reasons (Encyclopedia Britanica Wikipedia.org). Moishe and all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet, crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian Police, and although they and the other Jews cried, I did not see evidence of anyone trying to stop the police. Moishe the Beadle made it back and tried so very desperately to warn all of the Jews of what he had seen, the young girl Malka, who lay dying for three days, the Jews were told to dig huge trenches and then shot by the Gestapo, infants were thrown into the air and used as target practice. Not one soul in the village believed Moishe, they thought he was a mad man or even trying to gain their sympathy. Another year passed and by Spring of 1944 the German troops came into Hungary, even with reports of anti- Semitic attacks taking place every day, the people talked about nothing but that, then went into denial again even as the German Army vehicles appeared in their very streets. As time progressed, the main character of the book, Elie Wiesel, realized in the retrospect and reflection of an older man who wrote again on this subject that so many around him have lost their faith and regressed on an increasingly deepening level to animalistic behavior. And to be sure some may have even thought the German army vehicles were there to take them to safer ground, the officers would eat cake with the Jewish families at dinner.
Those of us who have experienced large measures of dysfunction and denial in our own families and communities can both empathize and identify with the progression of denial, division, and evil creep starting with Elie Wiesel, his father, and the members of their entire Jewish community. All of us can find some circumstance or situation in our own lives during which we may have overlooked a certain amount of evil such as with me all of the times I looked the other way or did not take an honest look at the true effect narcotics abuse and use was having on both my own life and the people around me. I can see how denial and acclimation to evil masked by hiding behind computer programming and long hours of online gaming has effected the very life, health, and personality of my younger brother. Due to spending countless hours of laying in front of a computer and eating junk food and soda for years, compiled with not doing any type of physical work or exercise, he developed cancer and both he and my mother are not willing to admit that they both have a role in this. She even delayed treatment for several months in order to not incur the expense. Severe dysfunction and evil go hand in hand as more and more of our lives are overtaken by them and before we know it, we lose our freedom and health, sometimes even our very lives.
Now we are at a point in time when we must ask ourselves, what does all of this mean, what of this powerful lesson in human history which shows us what denial and acclimation to evil has done and how can it effect our very lives? The very world we live in, the way commerce occurs between persons and nations, our very core individual values have been shaped by the Holocaust, for it can never be undone. I do not claim to be an expert, but I will say that I have learned a little about reading human eyes, voice tones, and physical mannerisms. Once can see from old footage of Adolf Hitler that the volume of his voice, the physical mannerisms and gestures, and the very intensity of his visual fixation that he did not see the human beings he was talking to. I recall this from memories I have of television footage, dates and channels unknown. I also have experienced in business and religion persons with fixed unwavering viewpoints who will not hear that which others have to say. These are innate instincts and vibes and also knowledge which I have picked up on my path in life, and although I do not always catch it every single time a person or media ad is trying to sway or control my thoughts, I have learned to protect myself and family to a much greater degree. The question is, how do we the people learn to truly listen to and be aware of what the other human being is trying to tell us? Will we listen and think for ourselves or will we sell out and give up the very cherished freedoms which many have died for and allow armed goons or corporations to rob us of our property and free will?
Works Cited
Cengage, Gail, “Introduction.” Nonfiction Classics for Students. Vol 4 Enotes 28 Feb. 2012
Web 29 Feb. 2012
Eschenburg, Theodor, et al. The Breakdown of Democratic Systems Between the Two World Wars.
New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1966. Print
Encyclopedia Britanica Inc. Transylvania. Wikipedia 2008.
Web 1 March 2012
Mc Mahon, Jeff. “Denial, Acclimation to Evil, and Loss of Innocence” Breakthrough Writer 17 Feb. 2011.
Web 26 Feb. 2012
Rubin, Susan. Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto. Dongguan City, Quang Dong
Province, China: Holiday House 2012. Print
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ushmm.org
Web 21 Feb. 2012
Wiesel, Elie. Night.
New York, New York, Hill and Wang 2006 Print
Writing Commons Approach to Thesis
Purdue Owl Introduction and Thesis Checklist
In-Class Exercise
Work on Your Introduction and Thesis
How to Set Up a Counterargument in Your Rebuttal Section (The Templates)
Some of my critics will dismiss my claim that . . . but they are in error when we look closely at . . .
Some readers will 0bject to my argument that . . . However, their disagreement is misguided when we consider that . . .
Some opponents will be hostile to my claim that . . . However, their hostility is unfounded when we examine . . .
My critics will object to my thesis on the grounds that . . . . However, they fail to see . . .
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