I think the Japanese army and Chineses are the best two lessons of why individualism, freedom and right matter...
AFAIK, the Japanese army was so cruel because there was no individualism in the slightest bit in Japan back then, and every soldier just blindly followed the orders and what others did, and yeah the authoritarian, populistic and patriotic ideologies were ingrained into every Japanese's mind, not to mention that the commanders of the army were very brutal to their subordinates and back then Japan was very brutal to weak men, thus Japan was very similar to nowadays China. So it is not strange for them to have been so cruel and inhumane...
I am not negating collectivism completely because the biggest contribution to nowadays Japaneses' politenesses and friendlinesses i just the collectivism. Imagine living in a place where you don't need to care about others' opinion about you... well you will def 'indulge' yourself, but individualism also matters, because without any individualism, the people in that ambience will suffer from 'The Lucifer Effect', because you will be like 'So what? My commanders tell me to do that crime and everyone else does so, so why do I need to feel guilty for what I've done?' And no freedom and right makes you not dare and inable to think independently.
The very similar phenomenon can be seen among Chineses. There are no old Chineses who feel guilty for what they did during the Cultural Revolution, and many many Chineses became as cruel as the Japanese army soldiers back then... like boiling a baby to eat, eating human meat, torturing people, and the only but the horrible difference is that, they were doing harms to their compatriots, as opposed to Japaneses doing harms to the people in other countries!