"Malicious advocacy of the self", or  "malicious defense of the commonality"?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Au contraire.  Most holocausts are perpetuated at least in part so that individuals (of Type A) may be free -- of the unwanted presence of individuals of Type B.  (Individual profiteering by looting the dead people's persons and property is also a factor).  But to step back a pace (and to be a bit more serious), what mass act of violence has ever been perpetuated under the slogan "so that individuals may be free"?  Is this "free" as in Arbeit Macht Frei?   And if we cannot find such a slogan on the banner of a act of large scale violence does this prove that individualism never generates l.s.v., but socialism does?

Backing off still further, is there even such a thing as an "individual" in this sense, since a holocaust by definition can only be perpetrated by large numbers of individuals acting under either a common ideological agenda or a common agenda of self interest?  A mass murderer no matter how diligent can, absent nuclear or biological weaponry, only kill a rather limited number of people in one lifetime:  holocausts by definition require collective action.  So, this is either a naive, or a deliberately obfuscatory, way to phrase the question.

It is estimated that during the 4 1/2 centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Portugal was responsible for transporting over 4.5 million Africans (roughly 40% of the total). During the eighteenth century however, when the slave trade accounted for the transport of a staggering 6 million Africans, Britain was the worst transgressor - responsible for almost 2.5 million. (A fact often forgotten by those who regularly cite Britain's prime role in the abolition of the slave trade.) [...]

The Triangle Trade, though morally reprehensible, was integral to the growth of the economies of the United States and Great Britain. The last leg of that trek, known as the Middle Passage, retains the infamy of having been a horrific journey for Africans who had been free in their countries but were being enslaved in the Americas. The Middle Passage is synonymous with intense human suffering, degradation, and mortality.

Let's ask now, whether the Triangle Trade and related activities of pre-fossil-energy, slavery-based commerce represented a sudden incursion of socialism and commensalism in the freebooting 17th and 18th centuries, the golden era of individualistic philosophy?  The centuries in which was consolidated that Wealth of Nations on which Smith's theories rest, that saw the birth of the highly individualistic "capitalist ideology"?  Were all these slave traders, each out for his own personal profit, somehow closet socialists?  How about the plantation owners who bought these human beings cheap and worked them to death on private plantations for private profit?  collectivist proto-Marxists to a man, no doubt.

Shall we split hairs and say that, well, this wasn't really a holocaust and doesn't count, because the burn rate in human lives was too low, this being a pre-industrial horrorshow?

Or should we conclude that slavery was a "crime of individualism" because the slave traders were
enthusiastic capitalists and believers in competition, and the trade primarily benefitted the economies of nations which became poster children for the Capitalist Way and the Cult of the Individual?  

"Collectivism is evil,"  "Individualism is evil," it's just not a meaningful way of parsing the world.  Without collectivism all along the way, from our primate ancestors to the Internet that enables us to exchange these fanfaronades [or Robinsonades in csk's case, hat tip to the old KM himself], we wouldn't be here.  Without individualism within that collective framework we wouldn't have art and idiosyncrasy and novelty of ideas and all kinds of interesting developments from trivial to profound.  The danger imho lies in idolising -- and I do mean idolising (as Rand did), making a golden calf or a graven image of, one or t'other instead of recognising them as tensile forces in balance providing structural integrity.


The difference between theory and practise in practise ...