Human being will genocide into being--as fulfillment of the fantasy that immortal bodies exist. 250,000,000 million dead in the 20th Century. Mass-murder is undertaken according to the theory that bodies politic are more significant human lives. 

Nationalism relocates the self into a place that seems to exist "out there." Nations articulate the desire to project the self into culture. Abstract, symbolic objects seem to have an objective existence-separate from the bodies of individuals. Unlike actual bodies, the body of culture seems immune from decay.

Human beings come and go, but nations seem to "live on." Nations are the "second body of the king." They are the second body of each one of us. For the nationalist, one's own body and one's nation are imagined to be a single entity. The fantasy of being symbiotically bound to a nation functions to negate our sense of finiteness and mortality.

To escape from one's own--real--body into the life of the nation is to identify with the fantasy of the (immortal) nation. One tries to forget that one's body is in the process of disintegration. Each organism is subject to the death instinct. Each organism is continually falling apart. 

The nation symbolizes the idea of a transcendent domain--that contains no death instinct. 

Genocide--this fantastic, grotesque social institution that is considered "normative" by many historians--grows out of a specific dynamic, which is not complex: The nation or body politic is judged to be more significant than the bodies of human beings.

Genocidal killing occurs in order to maintain the fantasy of an immortal body that is more significant than a human body. As human bodies are consumed by a nation, the nation "lives on."

Human beings will genocide into being--as fulfillment of the fantasy that immortal bodies exist. 250,000,000 million dead in the 20th Century. The body politic is conceived as more significant than a human body. The purpose of death is to create the fantasy of immortal life.