What Perpetrators of Evil Tell Themselves

They [the Serbs] found a remarkable solution: They felt sorry for themselves. They marinated in self-pity; self-cherishing, they fairly caramelized themselves in sentimentality. They solved their formidable moral problem by declaring themselves the injured party. An artful if disgraceful display of jujitsu; this is a tactic one encounters in wife beaters and child abusers, who ingeniously manage to convince themselves, if not the authorities, that they were driven to it by the terrible behavior of their victims.

- From Evil: An Investigation by Lance Morrow