Elie Wiesel's Indirect Wisom on China

When he was 15, Elie Wiesel and his entire family were crammed into cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz. Only Elie survived.  I just finished reading Night, his memoir of what happened to him in Nazi concentration camps.  This book had the same gripping impact on me that I experienced while viewing Schindler's List, a movie I saw once over ten years ago and still remember every minute of it.

This, it seems to me, is as it should be.

The book also contained his brief, eloquent, powerful Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Delivered in 1986, it is perhaps more true today than it was then, I am sad to say. One paragraph jumped out at me:

"Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. How can one not be sensitive to their plight? Human suffering suffering anywhere, concerns men and women everywhere."

What has this to do with China and the controversies continuing to swarm around the activities of Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google? It has everything to do with it.

Comments

[Tim]

Hi Shel,
is this posted related to Issac Mao's recent email?

[Benny Daon]

Very true.
The one doubt I have is whether we can end suffering in a swift. Maybe things in China are improving, I'm sure things are better now than at the days of the cultural revolution.