Success Quote by Rene Cassin

The sting here is in the timing: not during the fog of war, but after "victory took form", when excuses should have been in short supply. Rene Cassin frames betrayal as a postwar choice, not an accident of history. The sentence moves like a legal brief disguised as a moral indictment: establish the facts (victory, revelation of the camps), then pose the question that functions as a verdict. "How is it that..". is not curiosity; it's prosecutorial incredulity, the kind meant to make the listener feel the weight of what they already know.

Cassin's most telling word is "shamelessly". Shame is the social mechanism that should have activated once the extermination camps were known. Instead, he suggests, states and publics treated atrocity as a closed chapter that allowed a return to old habits: colonial control, displaced persons left in limbo, Jews and other survivors facing closed borders, lofty wartime rhetoric about freedom downgraded to peacetime realpolitik. The "promises given" nods to wartime pledges about self-determination and human rights, made under the pressure of "ordeal" and solidarity, then quietly reinterpreted when power arrangements reasserted themselves.

As a judge and a key architect of postwar human rights norms, Cassin is also defending the necessity of law against the cynicism of politics. The subtext is blunt: if the world could look directly at industrialized murder and still backslide, then moral feeling is not enough. Rights have to be codified, enforceable, and universal, because victory without accountability is just permission to forget.