In Japan’s Holy War (2009), Walter Skya concludes that the “total assimilation of the individual into a collective body is the goal of all totalitarianism movements.” Japanese nationalism was “only one variety.” The assimilation of the individual into the collective body is conceived as a “moral imperative.”

According to Skya, the Japanese objective before the Second World War was to “absorb the self into the Emperor.” Or one can say that the Emperor would be absorbed into the self. The ideal was to abandon the distinction between self and other; between the desires of the state (as embodied in the Emperor) and the self’s desires.

Rudolf Hess declared at mass rallies, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Hitler proclaimed to his youth: “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” The aspiration of Nazi ideology was to unite the German people to constitute a single body politic with HItler as the brain of this body. “Obedience” results when the will of the leader has been internalized into the mind and body of each follower.

Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872-1961) was a key thinker in the development of Japanese nationalism. The armed forces occupied a special position in his thinking. The Imperial Rescript to the armed forces, “One Spirit, Same Body” read:

Soldiers and sailors, we are your supreme Commander-in-Chief. Our relations with you will be the most intimate when we rely upon you as our limbs, and you look up to us as your head.

The ideal of absolute obedience grows out of this fantasy that imagines soldiers and sailors as “limbs” of a body--with the leader as head of this body. In this fantasy, following an "order" becomes virtually automatic. How can the limb of a body defy the head of this body?

This psychic state is obedience is not slavery in that the soldier or sailor embraces the will of the Emperor; does not seen to protest or resist. Ideally, the Emperor’s desires have become the soldier's desires.

The ideal of totalitarianism is the erasure of differences between one’s own desires and national imperatives. The individual disappears into the nation—becomes a cipher. He has so deeply internalized the mandates of his nation and its leaders that he does not object when he is asked to enter battle and, if necessary, to become “obedient unto death.”

Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” One becomes everything by becoming nothing, abandoning the boundaries of one’s ego to become at one with the entire nation.

Bernd Wegner (1990) observes that the SS-man saw himself as an “integrated element of a social organism.” Individual Germans were conceived as cells of the body politic. The SS-man could not act autonomously any more than a cell can act separately from the body of which it is part. “Obedience” depended on the fantasy that one was a cell within the national organism.

Wegner states that the individual in the eyes of the SS was only a “fragment of the body politic to which he owed allegiance.” His value—justification for his existence—depended on the “advantage he furnished the national community.” Just as the Japanese soldier existed solely for the sake of the Emperor and Japan, so the SS-man existed solely for the sake of Hitler and Germany.

As a “fragment of the body politic,” the SS-man—could not resist obeying the commands of the body of which he was part. Like the Japanese soldier, he was abandon his subjective will and internalized the “will of the Fuehrer.”

What is the purpose of “obedience”—of abandoning one’s subjective will in order to follow the orders of an Emperor or Fuehrer? To achieve a sense of omnipotence by imagining that one is part of the nation--a single body politic united under a single will. Hitler said:

It was necessary to give the German people that great feeling of community: suddenly out of the weak will of sixty million individuals there springs a gigantic mighty compressed will of all. Now it is not I who face the destiny of Germany, but an army of millions is at my side. I am part of this army: as individuals we may perhaps be weak, but taken together, nothing can break us.

Nationalism seeks absolute unity--millions of people united under the single will of a leader (an Emperor, or a Fuehrer). The will of the leader becomes coterminous with the “will of the people.” There is no separation between the nation, its leader and the people. The country is united into a single “gigantic, mighty compressed will.” Fused with this gigantic body united under and guided by a single will--the individual feels that he is omnipotent.