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Kelleigh Nelson's avatar

The slaughter was more like 850,000. At least 80,000 non-combatants, elderly men, women, children, both black and white, were slaughtered by William Tecumseh Sherman at the behest of Grant and Lincoln. He then went on to slaughter the buffalos and the Indians and called it the "final solution." The old stats are 620,000, but adding the non-combatants made it 700,000. The latest updates from researchers has the figures at 850,000. The original figures added up to more Americans lost in that war than in WWII.

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Tom Carberry's avatar

In the 1970s, I lived under martial law in Colombia. I lived in Bogota where the government had soldiers posted everywhere. They had a civil war at the time and for quite some time before and after. Latin America has a long tradition of martial law mitigated by the poor pay of soldiers who would take low level bribes to look the other way. The US still has at least one Colombian "guerilla" (Gorillas on the Plain of Jars, for those who read Mad Magazine during Vietnam) in the super max prison in Florence, Colorado. You can see remnants of this idea in Mexico, where one sees soldiers and cops in pickup trucks with submachine guns and often with 50 caliber machine guns driving around like good old boys. People mostly ignore them and they mostly ignore the people, with the occasional road side checkpoints.

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