We are all capable of horrible behaviour in certain conditions, but that's when our morality should kick in, writes Padraig O'Morain
WHAT DO you think of Samir Qantar who probably (there is some dispute over this) killed a four-year-old girl with his rifle butt on a raid into Israel in 1979 and was recently released in return for the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers?
What do you think of American men who are prepared to imprison and torment young teenagers in Guantanamo Bay? I refer to Omar Khadr, filmed crying for his mother or begging to be killed - the sound quality of the video tape makes the translation of his words uncertain - in 2003.
And it's not just men. There are the women who delighted in torment and death at Abu Ghraib; the Nazi women hanged for atrocities in the concentration camps; the women in Rwanda who hacked their neighbours to death in a church, resting now and then before continuing the work. And so on.
Are they, or were they, monsters? Probably not. I suspect that all the people I have mentioned were very much like you and me.
Ever noticed that sense of disappointment when some "monster" is hauled past the TV cameras and looks so ordinary, so insignificant, so like you and me?
You could make a much longer list of atrocities committed by men than by women. But that doesn't make us "worse" than women.
The role of men means that it is we, by and large, who get to do the fighting, the tormenting and the killing. But I have no reason to believe that there is any other difference between the sexes in this regard.
We humans find ourselves in situations in which we do things we would not otherwise do.
Samir Qantar committed his awful act as part of the conflict between Palestine and Israel. That conflict owes much, though not all, of its existence to the slaughter of Jews by the Nazis while the rest of Europe did little enough to help the victims.
The Americans in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were brought there by the planes that hit the World Trade Centre in 2001 and by the web of events which preceded, surrounded and followed the attack.
The Nazi killers imbibed years of propaganda against the Jews. It took many years of inter-communal dislike and suspicion to make the massacre in Rwanda possible - not to mention the fear of not being seen to be on the "right" side in the conflict.
Men and women behave badly. We do terrible things. But generally speaking we are not monsters. Conditions occur which lead us to do these things. Changing these behaviours is not only a matter of condemning individuals. It's also a matter of changing the conditions which made these behaviours more likely.
We might remember that during our current economic downturn. For instance, if we couldn't care less about healthy recreational facilities for young people, we are helping to create the conditions in which they are more likely to do the wrong thing.
But what of personal morality? Although the conditions I've mentioned earlier led to appalling acts, they didn't have to lead to them.
Samir Qantir didn't have to kill the girl; the Americans don't have to flout the rules of decency in Guantanamo Bay; the Nazi women didn't have to pursue careers in the concentration camps; the Rwandan women could have walked away (though perhaps at a high cost to themselves).
So morality in all these examples comes down to exercising a personal choice. On a more domestic level, so to speak, the man who kills his ex-girlfriend so that nobody else can have her would no doubt argue that all sorts of fears - or even love - drove him to it. He could, nevertheless, have made a different choice.
Or the ex-wife who uses her children as ammunition in her war with her ex-husband could argue that all sorts of things justify her behaviour. But she, too, could make a different choice.
In a world in which horrifying things happen many times a day, we need to pay more attention to the conditions that make these things more likely, while never forgetting the role of personal choices.
Otherwise we will be reminded again and again in the most awful ways.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book, That's Men - the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times is published by Veritas