If the writing of history is ultimately a prize for the victors, what can the ways in which people deicide to remember events and individuals tell us? Is memory merely a passive firing of synapses or is it a conscious creation and deliberate political act? What does memory, be it in the form of photographs, speeches, ceremonies, popular recollection, et cetera mean in the context of intense social trauma? This paper explores these questions, examining responses to the assassination of Lebanese President and Lebanese Forces militia leader Bashir Jemmayil and the death of Basel al Asad, scion of the Syrian ruling family. Drawing on a range of Arabic and French textual, audio and especially visual primary sources, this paper analyzes how these historical figures are reimagined and reinvented through both popular and official acts of producing memory. Totems of remembrance - images, statues, films - interact with one another in both a visual conversation and competition for authority. Similarly, speeches and eulogies address not only mourners but an audience across history, jockeying in an unending contest for historical legitimacy. Furthermore, the differences between official and popular memory of the same subject by members of the same group illustrate the extent to which memory is used to contest history. These sources, even (indeed especially) the swaggering and confident propaganda, betray insecurities and intense sociopolitical anxieties that are at the heart of impulses to create memory. Moreover, this paper examines how sociocultural constructs of religious ceremony, masculinity, and social class nuance the creation of memory. Despite the vast differences between the affected groups in question - middle class Maronite Lebanon and the Alawite-dominated Syrian state - both consciously deployed invented memories of their respective leaders in response to similar types of political and social anxiety. In this way, this paper re-articulates the experience of trauma from the lens of victimhood, relocating the agency to the deliberate and active creation of memory. It views those experiencing trauma not merely as passive victims but as historical actors deciding how they will remember their suffering and, importantly, how they might use these memories to their advantage.