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[MaxTheFox]

If that was their plan, they wouldn't have downgraded their claim from "Ukraine's going to set off a nuke and blame us" to "Ukraine is going to set off a dirty bomb and blame us". They greatly underestimated the amount of backbone North America and the rest of Europe possessed, and are desperately trying to find some propaganda claim that will weaken said backbone.

Except a modern nuke wouldn't be as destructive to civilians (comparatively) as a dirty bomb. Nukes, if detonated airburst, level cities but leave everything open for rebuilding due to the lack of huge amounts of fallout. Dirty bombs poison the soil with fallout for decades.

That's really not true at all. The "poison the earth for decades" notion refers to a cobalt bomb, which is a very "dirty" nuclear weapon fitted with a jacket of Cobalt 59 (ordinary cobalt metal) that is transmuted by the neutron flux into radioactive Cobalt 60 immediately before being vaporized by the extremely high energy of the atomic explosion. The energy of the blast turns the cobalt into a far finer particulate than any conventional explosion could, and Cobalt 60 (which is produced in very small numbers in an ordinary reactor - via transmuting iron into cobalt 59 and then the cobalt 59 into cobalt 60 - but far too little to readily collect) has very specific radioactive properties that make it a particularly nasty contaminant. The half-life of 5.27 years is long enough that you can't easily just wait it out, and short enough that the stuff is still extremely emissive. There's an inverse relationship between half-life and danger - the longer the half-life of a radioactive material, the less radiation it emits and thus the less danger it represents.

A so-called "dirty bomb" is just taking a bunch of radioactive material, wrapping it around some explosives, and detonating it. This scatters radioactive material around, but simple physics mean that the radioactive material is in much larger chunks and doesn't spread nearly as well. Simple radioactive materials don't generate the kind of hard neutron radiation you need to make more stuff radioactive, so it is just a lot of bits of radiation sitting around. And the thing about radiation is that it is pretty damn easy to detect. Cleanup from a dirty bomb would be expensive, but would simply amount to evacuating the area and sending a bunch of people in with radiations suits, firehoses (the vast majority of contamination would be outside, and can be washed down the sewers to be filtered out later), and Geiger counters (to track down and clean up anything that's left). Once that is done, the area can be reoccupied with no further risk. A fair number of people will have a somewhat elevated cancer risk, but it is not the doomsday weapon people think it is - it probably won't kill more than a handful of people other than those close enough to get caught in the actual blast.

Quite seriously, each of the groundbursts from American nuclear tests in the 50s and early 60s probably contaminated Las Vegas more than a hundred dirty bombs could.

Yeah I was thinking of cobalt bombs, thanks for correcting me.

Медленно ракеты уплывают вдаль...

[Vector]

Russia has declared lghbti+ to be a 'weapon of the West', and has decided to further restrict the rights of them in Russia.

We are very good at disrupting fascists, or so I like to think.

[Loud Whispers]

If Rohm is any measure to go by, just as good at being fascists

[Vector]

I had no idea. Interesting.

[Random_Dragon]

Yep. Ernst Röhm was the leader of the SA, up until its purge during the Night of Long Knives.

[Lord Shonus]

The Nazis came to power by co-opting a ton of burgeoning movements. Homosexuality as an identity (as opposed to an act) was a brand-new concept, and exploiting that was a viable way to gain some power. Fundamentally similar to the way they used "national socialism" in order to co-opt the socialist movement, the concept of the herrenvolk to exploit the people who wanted the Empire back, etc.

Even then, they were a fringe party. The only reason they were able to take over the country was that the Reichstag ran for many years without any faction having enough strength to pass laws. Constitutional provisions for this eventuality allowed legislation by a small cabinet, but it still didn't work very well. The conservative parties realized that the Nazis would be strong enough to create a controlling faction and let the government actually function, and were utterly convinced that the power of the party was broken. As part of that agreement, Hitler became Chancellor. Chaos happened for some mysterious reason, so the powers of the chancellor got expanded. When President Hindenburg died, Hitler used said expanded powers to merge the office of President with the office of Chancellor, allowing him to use the aforementioned constitutional powers to rule as a committee of one.

[Starver]

Yep. Ernst Röhm was the leader of the SA, up until its purge during the Night of Long Knives.

A pity he was shot in the mid-afternoon, if it had been when it was still dark you could have said that Röhm wasn't killed in the day...

[anewaname]

Has any alliance of factions carried out an armed revolution, without the dominant faction killing off important leaders from the weaker factions after the revolution was won?

[EuchreJack]

Has any alliance of factions carried out an armed revolution, without the dominant faction killing off important leaders from the weaker factions after the revolution was won?

After the American Revolution, both political parties lost leaders to duels.

[Lord Shonus]

Has any alliance of factions carried out an armed revolution, without the dominant faction killing off important leaders from the weaker factions after the revolution was won?

Arguably Bolivar's followers. Things fell apart after Bolivar himself died, because nobody was able to inherit his legitimacy, but it wasn't really a purge situation.

[MaxTheFox]

Russia has declared lghbti+ to be a 'weapon of the West', and has decided to further restrict the rights of them in Russia.

We are very good at disrupting fascists, or so I like to think.

Yeah I know right. I'm proud of being a Western agent.

[scriver]

 

Has any alliance of factions carried out an armed revolution, without the dominant faction killing off important leaders from the weaker factions after the revolution was won?

The French revolution is kind of the ur-example of that, I guess.

Napoleon too. I can't remember if he outright killed people but I do remember that Bernadotte, the revolutionary war-hero and basically Napoleon 2.0 (except more dashing, taller, and younger), is speculated to have accepted the offer to become King of Sweden over Napoleon's offer to make him Vice-Roy of Rome due to him fearing Nap would eventually try to off him over their rivalry – Bernadotte had already been effectively banished from Paris by Nap (the gentlemanly way, by putting him in charge of the Northern Front) to prevent him from interfering or becoming a political threat to Nap's leadership there.

I think it round be easier to find examples if you didn't specify "killing off afterwards"

I just thought of one example though -- the Iranian revolution in the 70's (or 80's?) that saw the Shah go and the theocracy installed. It considered something of a "stolen revolution" by the left-wing, liberals, and republicans who were later forced to flee the country. Iirc it started as student protests and snowballed from there, uniting many factions critical of the Shah whether socialists, liberals, or reactionaries. And the religious reactionaries turned out to be the ones in charge at the end of the revolution, and almost immediately turned on their former allies and started imprisoning and persecuting them.

[anewaname]

Yeah, the French Revolution's Reign of Terror example is mentioned as being the model for Lenin's Red Terror, and in the spoiler a few sentences are in bold:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was justified in Soviet historiography as a wartime campaign against counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921, targeting those who sided with the Whites (White Army). Bolsheviks referred to any anti-Bolshevik factions as Whites, regardless of whether those factions actually supported the White movement cause. Leon Trotsky described the context in 1920:

    The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances [than the French Revolution]. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and west. Besides the Russian White Guard armies of Kolchak, Denikin and others, there are those attacking Soviet Russia, simultaneously or in turn: Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Esthonians, Lithuanians ... In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges.
    — Trotsky (1920)

He then contrasted the terror with the revolution and provided the Bolshevik's justification for it:

    The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of November 1917 (new style) was actually accomplished with insignificant sacrifices. The Russian bourgeoisie found itself to such a degree estranged from the masses of the people, so internally helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the war, so demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any resistance. ... A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its hands is bound to, and will, suppress, rifle in hand, all attempts to tear the power out of its hands. Where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, it will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty.
    — Trotsky (1920)

While it may not seem to apply to Ukraine, ask the question of "if Russia is kicked out almost fully or fully from Ukraine, how does one stop the currently cooperating Ukrainian groups from dividing and fighting each other again?" I don't know all the groups which are working together, but they weren't cooperating before and that was only partly caused by Russian sock-puppet'ing. If Ukraine can rebuild from this, it seems they will need to rebuild around "representation for all" and not around "only one of the currently collaborating groups will hold power in the end". Ukraine is working on kicking the external Russian influences out of Ukraine, both militarily and politically, but there will be an internal struggle between Ukraine's currently allied forces. Even if this struggle starts with political pushing and shoving, these groups have become accustomed to escalate quickly to the use of weapons.

How does one mitigate this, and prevent "the dominant faction killing off important leaders from the weaker factions"?

As importantly, how does one mitigate the external Western influences that will seek to profit by creating divisions between Ukrainian political groups?

[Starver]

As it hasn't been mentioned yet, Russia is throwing a whole bunch of mudlike substances, trying to get at least some to stick. Usual MO, hard to tell what's true (apart from the wanting to take its ball home and refuse to play nicely in the one international agreement that actually exists), so read it as you will.

I have my suspicions, but that's beyond my ability to call.

[lemon10]

Has any alliance of factions carried out an armed revolution, without the dominant faction killing off important leaders from the weaker factions after the revolution was won?

I imagine purge free revolutions were common in the past in countries with weak central leadership when killing off the weaker factions meant that you needed to send armies in to siege their castles over years for minimal gain or piss off all your loyal lords.

Because of that its clear that the way to prevent such purges is to start a nuclear war so that technology degrades far enough that everyone has castles again.