Goran Sadikarijo: Dressing up as Hitler Shouldn’t be ‘Funny’ in North Macedonia

However, a critique of Nazism was not present in the meme that the tech mogul Elon Musk shared on Twitter last year. Criticizing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau' attitude towards truckers' protests against Covid vaccinations, Musk compared him to Hitler through a meme.

An avalanche of reactions accused the tech giant of belittling one of the world's largest genocides, simply because he disagreed with a politician. After the controversy, Musk deleted the tweet.

Today, Hitler appears in many corners of the Internet as a funny character, while the Nazi "Zig Heil" greeting may even be a gesture that your classmates greet you with. The well-known and easily replicable moustache of the Führer has become a quick mask for April Fool's jokes.

In the everyday life of young people, Hitler's character is often emptied of historical meaning. The pandemic generations took classes online starting from the third grade. According to the Macedonian curriculum, they are only expected to learn about World War II in the ninth grade.

Throughout the period from the third to the ninth grade, however, many young students are exposed to misinformation, fake news and distortions of history. And often they receive all of this without any adult supervision or parental control.

"We as parents should look in the mirror and ask ourselves if, in the race to provide our families' livelihoods, we have left our children only to the educational system, which in turn is no longer adequately involved in young people's upbringing," Goran Sadikarijo, Executive Director of the Holocaust Fund, told BIRN.

Obligations undertaken, then forgotten

The fund reacts constantly to anti-Semitic occurances. Photo by BIRN/Vasko Magleshov...