> "My view is that poor and average people are alright..."

My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.