Time & Perspective Quote by Manfred von Richthofen

Enthusiasm is doing a lot of moral laundering here. Richthofen frames killing as a hobby one can pick up, savor, then move on from, like a fad you outgrow. The first sentence is almost breezily democratic: anything can be made thrilling. Then he cashes out the abstraction with a specific, sickening example - bomb throwing - and the tone snaps into boyish delight. That contrast is the point. He isn’t confessing guilt; he’s reporting pleasure with the calm of someone discussing sport.

The subtext is the First World War’s great innovation: distance as an emotional technology. “From above” is not just a tactical advantage, it’s an ethical solvent. Altitude turns people into “fellows,” a casual, vaguely collegial term that keeps the enemy human enough to be interesting but not human enough to matter. Bombs become objects you “throw,” not weapons you deploy; the phrasing shrinks mechanized slaughter down to a gesture, a game of aim and release.

Context matters, too: Richthofen was a celebrity pilot in a new kind of warfare that fused aristocratic dueling fantasies with industrial killing. His candor reads like a dispatch from that cultural crossroads. The line isn’t propaganda in the chest-thumping sense; it’s more unsettling than that. It’s an unguarded glimpse of how quickly modern war teaches people to aestheticize violence - not through ideology, but through the simple dopamine of control, success, and spectatorship.