Russians are destroying huge quantities of evil food in massive, endlessly televised spectacles. The process of destroying food is given more air time than even Ukraine on Russian television.
My analyst is on vacation, so I can’t ask what is the psychoanalytic meaning of this collective ritual of gleefully and nervously destroying food by people who have very vivid collective memories of endless starvation throughout the XXth century. I know there’s something there because the food trauma is profound and impacts many facets of reality for Russians. But I can’t quite figure out what it is.
Clarissa's Blog 
My first guess is intimidation: For now we’re destroying foreign luxury foods, support us and it won’t be bread and potatoes next….
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Exploiting the food trauma to terrorize? That makes a lot of sense because an average Russian is bound to have quite a visceral response to these images.
Why do they need to be terrorized, though, is a mystery. Nobody is against Putin.
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I say it is more or less classical religious sacrifice. Just do not define “religion” too narrowly, as Russian Orthodoxy… think of it as some synthessi of everything, from Orthodoxy, to Communism to … Perunism.
As for the “rational reasons” – the “Russian patriots” believe that if they stop buying everything Western, the western businesses will apply pressure on their governments and make them nice to Russia. To understand Russians you have to assume that they feel entitled, on principle, since they are a great power, to do everything the US does when US interests are at stake. Or, more recently, they feel entitled to do everything they believe the US does.
But apparently Russian businesses were not sufficiently patriotic and kept importing all those western goods. So the government is trying to bully Russian businesses into submission by destroying food for which Russian businesses have already paid.
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It does look strangely religious in nature, I agree. Some pagan rite of collective penance, or something. Really weird things are happening to the poor Russians.
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