Jokes about killing UOC priests

In the scripted video, an OCU cleric loads the “body” of a UOC priest into a car. Photo: ortho.east

The pro-OCU media platform Pravoslavni Skhidniaky (“Orthodox Easterners”) has posted a “comedy” video in which a man in a cassock puts the “body” of a UOC priest into the trunk of a car after supposedly killing him for refusing to pray in Ukrainian.

According to the script, the man in the cassock is speaking on the phone with a woman who tells him that “the people of Great Rus must not be divided.”

“We’re leaving your Church and have found a new priest. He explained everything to us, and he doesn’t pray in that Ukrainian of yours,” the woman says.

“Yes, yes, I found him too,” the man replies as he adjusts the “body’s” legs and closes the trunk of the car.

The video features E. Akopov, head of the Pravoslavni Skhidniaky platform. The project itself claims that its mission is to “bring hope, defend dignity and strengthen faith,” and several OCU clerics are involved in it.

Of course, the creators present the video as a clever “joke.” But how appropriate is this kind of humor at all – especially when it targets the clergy of a confession that is now being cast off as “the enemy”?

This looks more like a new stage of the Overton Window. According to this theory, even the most unacceptable idea can eventually be put into practice by moving it through several stages: “Unthinkable – Radical – Acceptable – Sensible – Popular – Legal Standard.”

Of course, we will now be told that we are “blowing things out of proportion” and “can’t take a joke.” But first, the stage of “blowing things out of proportion” when it comes to the UOC ended about 11 years ago. And second, “every joke contains only a grain of jest. The rest is truth.”

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