Memory wars and the fragile design of commemoration

Eugenia Roccella, Italy's Minister for the Family, declared last Saturday that memory trips to Auschwitz "served to tell us that antisemitism belonged to a time located in a precise area: fascism". Liliana Segre, 95, Shoah survivor, responded sharply: "The memory of historical truth hurts only those who keep skeletons in their cupboards".

The controversy exploded according to the predictable script of Italian polarisation. But beneath the tribal surface, there's a structural pattern that crosses continents and epochs: the battle for ownership of collective memory.

And this pattern reveals something critical about how we design, or fail to design, the systems that should prevent us from repeating history's most catastrophic errors.

The mechanism underneath

When I managed the digital transition in the '90s, I learnt a lesson that applies surprisingly well to memory institutions: complex systems maintain their functionality only if they preserve the structural integrity of their critical components.

Break a fundamental link in the architecture, and the entire system degrades. Not gradually. Precipitously.

Commemorations like Auschwitz trips are designed systems, even if we rarely think of them that way. They have a specific architecture: historical event, followed by analysis of the structural conditions that made it possible, culminating in a universal lesson applicable to the present.

In the case of the Shoah: Nazi-fascism led to industrial mass extermination, which gives us a categorical imperative: never again these totalitarian mechanisms, wherever they emerge.

This link (fascism as a specific case of a universal pattern of totalitarianism) isn't ideology. It's the functional design of the system. It's what makes commemoration a prevention tool rather than an empty ritual.

When Roccella suggests this link was "built to encourage anti-fascism", she's attempting a decoupling move: separating the historical event from its structural lesson to claim moral authority over a different framing, namely that "the real antisemitism today is elsewhere".

But this is precisely how collective memory systems collapse.

The analogy with common pool resources

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics studying how communities manage shared resources (forests, fishing grounds, irrigation systems) without degrading them into the "tragedy of the commons".

She discovered that functioning systems have specific design principles: clear boundaries, rules adapted to local context, participatory monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms.

But above all: explicit recognition of the community's right to organise itself.

Collective memory works with similar mechanisms. It's a shared resource that can be preserved or degraded. And it degrades rapidly when political actors begin to "privatise" pieces of the narrative for tribal purposes.

The pattern is universal.

Russia uses the memory of World War II to legitimise the invasion of Ukraine by calling it "denazification". It took a functioning memory system (the USSR defeated Nazism) and corrupted it by removing the link to the universal lesson (totalitarianism must be fought everywhere) to justify... a totalitarian action.

The United States battles over Confederate monuments in exactly this way: an attempt to reframe the Civil War not as "defence of slavery" (historical fact) but as "heritage" or "states' rights" (disguised tribalism).

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, initially considered a global model, was progressively abandoned. Thirty years later, one of its architects describes it as degraded into an "inert museum artefact" rather than a "springboard for continuing change". Why? Lack of systematic follow-through, internal political resistance, and gradual transformation from prevention tool to tribal identity badge.

When memory becomes weapon rather than tool

I've seen this pattern in completely different sectors. When a best practice is "adopted" by an organisation that doesn't understand the underlying structural principles, but just wants the brand.

You copy the ritual, you lose the function.

Memory institutions have two failure modes.

First, empty ritualisation. Commemorations become performances without connection to present behaviours. Students go to Auschwitz, cry, return, and zero changes in how they recognise authoritarian mechanisms when they see them. This is the risk Roccella mentioned, and it's legitimate. But the solution isn't to break the historical link; it's to strengthen it by connecting it better to the present.

Second, tribal weaponisation. Memory becomes ammunition to prove that "we are morally superior to you". At that point it has completely lost its universal prevention function. It becomes just another identity battlefield.

Educational research on Auschwitz trips is clear: when properly prepared (before, during, after), these aren't "trips" but triggers for what scholars call "empathy of care". The formation of historically aware citizens through simultaneous cognitive, affective and physical experience.

But, and this is critical, effectiveness depends on keeping the structural link intact: these horrors were committed by specific regimes, under identifiable conditions, and the lesson is universal.

The game theory of memory

There's another dimension many miss: collective memory is a focal point in Thomas Schelling's sense.

Focal points are coordinated solutions that people converge on naturally in the absence of explicit communication. They work because they have a certain shared "obviousness".

"Never again fascism" after the Shoah is a focal point. It kept Europe away from totalitarianism for 80 years not because it was written in law, but because it was a shared convergence point for "what NEVER to do".

When someone begins to destabilise the focal point (even with seemingly legitimate motivations like "but today antisemitism comes from other sources"), they're not just making an observation. They're removing a mechanism of social coordination.

And without shared focal points, societies become far more fragile. Because every decision requires explicit negotiation instead of implicit convergence on "moral obviousness".

Via negativa: what NOT to do

The tradition running from Machiavelli to Taleb teaches us: it's easier to know what NOT to do than what to do.

Post-trauma societies that have managed collective memory best are those that followed certain structural "don'ts".

Don't separate the event from the lesson. Post-Nazi Germany worked because it maintained the link: "This happened here, to us, and the lesson is that we must forever guard against these mechanisms". Anyone trying to say "but that was a different time" is immediately recognised as dangerous.

Don't permit tribal privatisation of memory. The moment one group appropriates commemoration for identity purposes, the system degrades. Memory must remain a shared resource with a universal lesson.

Don't confuse legitimate evolution with destabilisation. Obviously context changes. But updating the application of the lesson ("today authoritarianism manifests like this") is different from breaking the causal link ("that type of authoritarianism was specific to then").

Don't treat memory as performative rather than preventive. Commemorations that work modify present behaviours. Those that fail are just emotional theatre.

The antifragility test

Nassim Taleb taught us to distinguish fragile, robust and antifragile systems. Fragile systems break under stress. Robust ones resist. Antifragile ones improve under stress.

An antifragile memory institution should become stronger, not weaker, when challenged. How?

Through the principle of via negativa: the more society evolves and forms of authoritarianism change, the clearer it becomes that the underlying structural mechanisms (tribalism, scapegoating, normalisation of violence, erosion of checks and balances) remain constant.

Every new attempt at authoritarianism should strengthen the lesson of Auschwitz, not weaken it.

But this requires conscious design. It requires those managing educational institutions to think like systems architects, not political performers.

The implication for policy designers

If you work in education policy, institutional memory, or any system that must transmit lessons across generations, the clinical question is this.

Are you building systems that maintain structural integrity under political pressure, or are you creating ammunition for future memory wars?

Because the history of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (from South Africa's which was abandoned, to Rwanda's where the Hutu/Tutsi distinction became more rigid rather than more fluid) teaches us a brutal lesson.

Without robust design, continuous maintenance, and active defence of structural integrity, even the best-intentioned systems collapse.

And then memory prevents nothing.

It becomes just another battlefield where people fight for tribal superiority rather than universal lessons.

In the end, who's right in this specific Italian controversy? That's not the interesting question.

The interesting question is: how do we design memory institutions that survive their designers and continue to function when politics change?

Because this is what separates societies that learn from their catastrophic errors from those that repeat them with different names.