Well There's Your Problem

So how do we get from, "holy fuck that was fuckin' awful" to "hey, let's build a monument to the guy who made it so fuckin' awful"?

Here's part of it - Northwestern (2012):

Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling. 

Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.

“A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it,” said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.”
The fog effect over time is something of a blessing when we're talking about a PTSD kinda thing for an individual.

But when it becomes a mass delusion, then we've set our selves up to repeat the thing that was so fuckin' awful.

Memory Studies

Collective and Individual Memory

Memory operates on the individual as well as the collective level. "Memory nonetheless captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived side and the collective, social, and constructed side of our relations to the past”. It allows for individuals, groups and societies to be creative as its “anachronistic quality—its bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones”.

Memory aids in the formation of identity. This alignment, however, is not a direct one as “our relationship with the past only partially determine who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other”. Our identities are therefore formed based on personal memories but also the interactions with other memories.