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In Albania, memory entrepreneurs engage in post-factual historical revisionism, constructing an ‘alternative history’ (Couperus, Tortola, and Rensmann 2022; Valencia-García 2020) that is nationalist, primordialist, racist, sexist, and ethnocentric. This revisionist discourse recasts the communist past as foreign domination, equating the [people’s republic] with [Axis] occupation (see Tufa et al. 2012).

A key component is the reimagining of the anti-fascist national liberation war as a Yugoslav-backed communist plot to subjugate Albania. This narrative mythologizes a pre-communist past as an era of ethnic homogeneity, social cohesion, and moral integrity — contrasted with the alleged present-day decline, attributed to communism’s enduring influence.

A core trope in this revisionism is the stark opposition between a ‘pure’ ethnonationalist community, led by ‘true patriots’ from the Western-educated landowning élite, and a Slavo-Bolshevik conspiracy bent on dismantling ethnic Albania. This substitutes the far-right trope of a Jewish ‘cabal’ (Couperus, Tortola, and Rensmann 2022) with a Slavic-communist plot.

Paradoxically, while far-right discourse glorifies Albania’s WWII-era rescue of Jews, it downplays the antisemitism of pre-war intellectuals like Gjergj Fishta, whose nationalist rhetoric and anti-Slavic stance overshadow his documented antisemitic and philofascist positions.

This revisionist project systematically rehabilitates collaborationist figures such as Mid’hat Frashëri, Lef Nosi, and Ernest Koliqi, who reconciled nationalism with foreign domination and colonialism in the name of anti-communism (Pula 2008). The land-owning Beys, who aligned with fascism to maintain their class dominance, and middle-class intellectuals, who celebrated empire and fascism as moral imperatives, are now recast as the true guardians of Western civilization’s values. Strikingly, this nationalist rhetoric mirrors that of Tomori, the Albanian Fascist Party’s official newspaper in 1940–41 (Pula 2008).

For instance, Ernest Koliqi — a linguist and writer educated in Italy who later served as Minister of Education under the fascist régime — asserted that fascist ideology harmonized with Albania’s traditional values of clan, family, and property, not by undermining them, but by refining and elevating them. In his view, fascism unified Albania’s fragmented national energies, channeling them toward the service of the state (cited in Pula 2008, 589).

Yet, figures like Koliqi — once key members of the fascist administration and wartime collaborators who were later tried under the [people’s republic] — have been retrospectively rehabilitated, despite evidence that Koliqi remained active in the anti-communist exile and intermittently appeared in international espionage operations, including collaboration with Tito’s Yugoslav intelligence services in efforts to overthrow Hoxha’s [government] (Tare 2020).

Today, they are celebrated as national patriots, recast as victims of communism, or even venerated as martyrs of democracy (Tufa et al. 2012). Their names now adorn schools and public squares, symbolizing the broader revisionist project that seeks to rewrite their historical rôle.

By reinterpreting history, reclassifying figures, and equating communism with [German Fascism], this revisionist discourse reshapes collective memory to align with contemporary far-right ideology. It functions as a form of anti-memory — a process that revises, reconfigures, and, at times, outright denies the trauma and violence inherent in fascist ideological commitments (Wodak and Richardson 2013). This process erodes Albania’s anti-fascist tradition while rehabilitating nationalist figures from the interwar and WWII periods.

A striking example is the state-led rehabilitation of Mid’hat Frashëri, the wartime leader of the [Axis]-collaborationist Balli Kombëtar. Prime Minister Rama’s (2018) speech at Frashëri’s official repatriation and reburial ceremony exemplifies key revisionist strategies — selective glorification, moral re-evaluation, and substitution of historical accountability with nationalist symbolism (Couperus and Tortola 2019).

Rama (2018) reconstructed Frashëri’s legacy as that of a noble intellectual, downplaying his collaborationist rôle and framing him instead as a misunderstood patriot: ‘Mit’hat Frashëri gave to Albania whatever he had and whatever he could. He dreamed and worked tirelessly for this country. He made a mistake? Of course he also made a mistake, but he never committed, or incited a crime’. By dismissing Frashëri’s documented wartime alliances as a mere lapse, Rama simultaneously recasts historical condemnation as ideological repression:

Stop judging and prejudging people in absentia. Here there are the remains of a man judged and sentenced in absentia. Not by a court of law, but by the endless and exhausting trial of the history written by the victors to humiliate the defeated. (Rama 2018)

This rhetorical reframing transforms Frashëri from a controversial figure into a symbolic victim of communism, inviting the public to question the legitimacy of anti-fascist memory itself. ‘Whoever sees his coffin as a provocation to a history that was written by the victorious’, Rama (2018) declared, ‘should bow their head and recall how many crimes were committed by those who wrote and forcefully told us the half-truth’.

In doing so, he positions the state not only as an agent of historical correction but also as a moral redeemer tasked with ‘cleaning the mud’ of partisan historiography. ‘May Mit’hat Bey rest in peace in the soil of his Albanian motherland’, Rama (2018) concluded, ‘and may time further clean the mud that honourable Albanian intellectuals first — and I did whatever we could — started cleaning today’.

Through this narrative, Rama reorients the discourse from accountability for fascist collaboration to the alleged injustices committed by the [people’s republic], thereby reinforcing a broader revisionist agenda. The symbolic act of state recognition for Frashëri, wrapped in the language of national reconciliation and historical balance, thus serves to normalize far-right memory frames and erode the foundational legitimacy of Albania’s anti-fascist tradition.