War & Peace Quote by Wilhelm Keitel

There is a bureaucrat's cold thrill in how Keitel shrugs off both chivalry and law. By pairing "knightly conduct" with the Geneva Convention, he collapses two moral languages - the old myth of honorable combat and the modern architecture of international rules - and dismisses them in one breath. The line isn't just descriptive; it's permission. It signals that the war has been reclassified, moved from a domain where restraint is expected into one where anything can be argued as necessary.

The specific intent reads like internal messaging: stop hesitating, stop worrying about optics, stop treating the enemy as a legitimate opponent. "No longer" is doing heavy lifting. It implies there was a time when norms mattered, or at least when pretending they mattered was useful. Now the mask can come off. That's the subtext: legality and honor are not principles, they're tactics.

Context sharpens the menace. Keitel, as a top military functionary of Nazi Germany, operated in a regime that needed its generals to translate ideology into orders. His phrasing is the administrative bridge between political goals and operational brutality: once you declare the conventions irrelevant, massacres, starvation policies, and the treatment of prisoners become not aberrations but policy instruments.

Calling it "no longer" also tries to preempt moral recoil. It frames law as outdated etiquette in the face of total war, as if restraint is naive. That's why it works: it flatters the listener's toughness while laundering criminality through the language of inevitability.