Politics & Power Quote by Frieda von Richthofen

War doesn’t just reveal character; it licenses its ugliest improvisations. Frieda von Richthofen’s line is built like a quiet rebuke, starting with “Of course,” as if anyone paying attention should already know the result: conflict doesn’t merely permit brutality, it accelerates it, making “madnesses” feel like normal reactions to an abnormal world. The plural matters. She isn’t talking about one diagnosable insanity but a whole swarm of distortions - cruelty, paranoia, numbness, thrill-seeking - the emotional side effects a battlefield hands out like rations.

The subtext is a refusal of the easy story societies tell themselves after bloodshed: that atrocities happen because the enemy is uniquely barbaric, or because one nation has a special moral defect. Von Richthofen pushes blame upward, away from individual pathology and toward the system that pressures ordinary people into extraordinary violations. It’s an anti-scapegoating argument, and it has bite because it doesn’t absolve anyone so much as indict the machinery that makes their worst impulses strategically useful.

Context sharpens the point. Born into the Wilhelmine German world and living through the mass-industrial slaughter of World War I’s aftermath, she would have seen how modern war drafts not only bodies but consciences. Her phrasing offers a kind of emotional realism: you can’t build an environment that rewards dehumanization and then act shocked when men start sounding, and behaving, unrecognizable. It’s less a plea for sympathy than a demand for honesty about what war is designed to do.