Politics & Power Quote by Charles Guggenheim

A director’s voice sneaks into this line: brisk scene-setting, a hard cut to motive, then the moral close-up. Charles Guggenheim isn’t waxing philosophical; he’s framing a moment so the audience can’t look away from what power does when it wants to tidy up a mess. “Trying to escape” is the euphemism that always shows up in wartime paperwork, a phrase designed to launder a killing into procedure. Guggenheim immediately undercuts it with “obviously,” a small word that carries an editor’s impatience with official fog. He’s telling you there was no ambiguity here, only a story someone hoped would pass as plausible.

The intent is plain: to justify why a war crimes trial existed at all, and to insist that legality matters even when the victim is just one prisoner and the perpetrators likely saw themselves as enforcing order. The subtext is sharper: modern wars don’t just produce atrocities; they produce narratives that attempt to normalize them. The trial becomes less about a single shot than about whether the postwar world will treat “we had to” as an acceptable substitute for law.

Contextually, this sits in the post-World War II moral architecture that the Geneva Convention helped formalize: not a sentimental document, but a bureaucratic firewall against convenient cruelty. Guggenheim’s plainspoken delivery is the point. By refusing melodrama, he makes the violation feel more damning, like catching someone lying in a ledger rather than on a battlefield.