Teaching the history of terrorism: the political strategies of memory obstruction

Although more than 30 years have past, Italy continues to struggle with the difficult memory of the 1970s, a decade marked by an extreme intensification of political violence. The incapacity and unwillingness of Italian society to come to terms with this traumatic past contributes to the maintenance of a range of conflicting memories, which is particularly immanent in history education, one of the primary sources in processes of memory construction. In this essay I analyse a number of Italian school textbooks published over the past 30 years, using the concept of cultural forgetting in an attempt to unfold the political strategies of memory construction, or rather, ‘obstruction’ in history education. I find that Italian school textbooks use facts in very selective ways, often creating distorted images of the past which contribute to the difficult memory of the 1970s in Italy. In discussing the findings, I consider the role of memory communities in the creation of ‘counter‐memories’ as opposed to the dominant, ‘official’ memories that tend to omit, sideline or simply ignore facts that might contribute to a better understanding of the origins and consequences of political violence in Italy in the 1970s