Jones explains it this way: “When you read genocide studies you find that most murderers also did many nice things: walked the family dog, baked cookies, gave gifts, helped a friend in need or played with their children just before or after they committed atrocities.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, someone Jones references, spent years in the Soviet gulag and said of captors, “Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem for our own roots? Our own blood? It is our own. And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just an executioner?’ It is a dreadful question if one answers it honestly.”

Solzhenitsyn is identifying about himself and his countrymen what I have come to understand about my own self, friends, and family: we are all capable of justifying and committing extreme evil under the right circumstances.