The Nation is an Immortal Body
Richard Koenigsberg

The idea of a nation is sustained by a fantasy about the body. There is no separation between the abstract idea and the physical experience upon which the abstract idea is built. The meaning of nationalism is revealed by the fantasy that is its source.

Adolf Hitler articulated and enacted the central fantasy of nationalism: creation of an immortal body through elimination of “enemies.”

What is an enemy? A symbolic entity that contradicts or negates the fantasy of a nation's immortality. This is why human "history" is the history of war. Each cultural entity asserts its own omnipotence, or immortality. But human beings who live within and embrace another cultural entity believe that their cultural entity is immortal.

An "enemy" is that which negates a cultural entities' fantasy of its own immortality. Thus, human history is the history of wars. The struggle for immortality versus the desire to destroy entities whose very existence negates one's own nation's belief in its immortality. . Kill the split off knowledge of the truth. Nothing lives forever. 

In nationalism, the body politic takes the place of one’s own body. "Oppression" is the experience of this massive body attached to the self. One is weighed down and diminished by the symbolic object bound to the self (psychosomatically experienced).

Hitler declared, “You are nothing, your nation is everything:” 

Totalitarianism is the fantasy that everyone and all significance is contained within and constitutes a particular body politic. One Reich, one Fuhrer, all human beings bound in a state of fusion with this body; no such thing as separation from this body. The dream of immortality means identification with this particular body politic, simultaneously an escape from one’s own body.

Jews symbolized the idea that German immortality was a delusion.

“Killing Jews” meant killing the negation of the fantasy of immortality. As Bin Laden put it, "Death to the non-believers."