Memes that circulate on social media have the potential to provide insightful information and spotlight the truth, but they can also promote false or misleading information.

In the latter case, whether a creator is intentionally promoting lies for propaganda purposes or is ignorant of the facts, these memes can cause great harm and must be challenged until they are corrected or removed from the internet.

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One meme, for example, depicts two apparent prisons positioned side by side, with prisoners standing behind fences and barbed wire.

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On the left structure is written: “POLAND.” Above it, with an arrow pointing downward, are the words, “THE FIRST GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMP.”

On the right structure is written: “EL SALVADOR.” Above that one with its own downward arrow, it states, “FIRST AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMP.”

Below both structures the meme’s creator wrote: “THERE’S A REASON YOU DON’T DO IT IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY.”

Though I believe the creator of the meme was well-intentioned in alerting viewers to connections between two points in history where authoritarian regimes denied civil rights protections to their residents without due process of law, the meme nonetheless engages in historical revisionism and erases other important events.

Concentration Camp: “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The collective history of concentration camps shows some consistent general characteristics: brutal working conditions; insufficient supplies of food, clean water, or sanitation; rampant disease; inadequate medical services and medications; lack of freedom of movement outside the limits imposed by occupying forces; rescinded human and civil rights; and in many instances, military incursions, armaments, bombardments, and death.  

When the topic of concentration camps arises, most people think of the series of armed encampments constructed and maintained under the Nazi regime in Germany and throughout its conquered territories during the 1930s until the end of World War II in 1945.

Some were designated as forced hard labor encampments, while others the Nazis constructed as massive death factories for the murder of those the regime considered undesirable.

The first of these was the Dachau camp, set up in March 1933 soon after Hitler’s rise to power. Here, Nazi authorities and military personnel arrested and imprisoned people the regime regarded as “enemies of the state” and as antithetical to the goals of Nazism. These so-called “enemies” included communists, socialists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as those the regime defined as racially impure, non-Aryan, and subhuman, like Jews, male homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, and people with disabilities.  

Dachau was the first of the more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites – which included city and town ghettos – established under the German Nazi regime.

Located in an abandoned munitions factory about 10 miles northwest of Munich in southern Germany, Dachau became a “model” for other concentration camps that would follow. It also served as a training site for SS concentration camp guards. Dachau was the oldest and longest-operating of all the camps.

The estimated number of prisoners incarcerated in Dachau between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 200,000, and at least 40,000 prisoners died there.

While these are arguably the most widely known, the history of concentration camps is much more extensive than we might think. Governments have set up encampments in differing forms and configurations and called them different names, like “reeducation camps,” “internment camps,” “ghettos,” “prison campuses,” “work camps,” “death camps,” “relocation camps,” “gulags,” and many others.

The expansion of the United States was, in part, justified by the underlying philosophical principle of Manifest Destiny. Based on the belief that God intended the United States to expand its holdings and power across North America, Manifest Destiny involved displacing indigenous peoples and colonial powers from the east coast to the west. The doctrine embraced a belief in American Anglo-Saxon superiority.

When he inhabited the White House, Andrew Jackson argued that white settlers (a pleasant term for “land thieves”) had a “right” to confiscate Indian land. Though he proposed a combination of treaties and an exchange or trade of land, he maintained that white people had a right to claim any Indian lands that were not under cultivation. Jackson recognized as the only legitimate claims for Indian lands those on which they grew crops or made other “improvements.”

The Indian Removal Act of May 28, 1830, authorized President Jackson to confiscate Indian land east of the Mississippi River, “relocate” its former inhabitants, and exchange their former land with territory west of the river. The infamous “Trail of Tears” during Jackson’s presidency attests to the forced evacuation and redeployment of entire indigenous nations. On the journey, many died of cholera, exposure to the elements, contaminated food, and other environmental hazards.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 excluded Native Americans from citizenship, considering them, paradoxically, as “domestic foreigners.” They were not accorded citizenship rights until 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, although Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.

In 1838, the army arrested members of the Cherokee tribes in the southeast and drove them into prison camps before “relocating” them to Oklahoma. Many indigenous peoples died in these so-called “emigration depots” due to the swift spread of diseases in poor sanitary conditions.

The plantation system and enslavement of Africans could also be termed a form of concentration camp, considering the United States kidnapped them from their native lands, transported them across vast distances, dumped them onto unknown territories, separated them from their children and other family members, and enslaved them among harsh working conditions, meager housing, little food, and poor medical services. Enslaved Africans often endured torture and sexual assault by whites in power, sometimes ending in murder.

After the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1942, military officials uprooted and transported approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans to internment (concentration) camps in several interior states far from the shores.

The landmark Supreme Court decision in Korematsu v. United States ruled 6-3 that Executive Order 9066 was constitutional “as a matter of military urgency,” ordering Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship status.

Not until Ronald Reagan’s administration did the U.S. officially apologize to Japanese Americans and pay reparations amounting to $20,000 to each survivor as part of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.

So, no, the atrocities taking place in El Salvador are far from the first time the United States has done something like this. But perhaps if enough of us stand up to the administration, it can be the last.

Memes posted on social media can certainly provide insight and connect events in a way that informs and highlights them in an easy and simple format when constructed factually. But if not done properly, they can propagate false information and bury the truth.

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