> respect the will of its citizenry, whatever it is
How do you define that? Is it always what the majority decides? What if the liberal secular government knows that going along with the will of the people will result in a minority of the population losing most of their rights and potentially suffering extreme oppression?
One could could assume that after learning what happened in Germany in the 30s (and some other comparable situations) most people would agree that even liberal states need to draw a line at some point.
Not really? Islamists in secular Muslim states are trying to overturn the secular legal all the time (and have succeeded on numerous occasions). Often they end up compromising and end up with a mixed system which is also far from ideal.
What other options are there though when the other side has zero interest in secularism and will do whatever they can to institute a theocratic government when given the opportunity?
Some (most?) forms of Islam are just not compatible with western style democracy and secularism. It’s unfortunate but I don’t really see any other realistic options of solving this besides “oppression”.
Some countries like Jordan kind of partially pulled it off but they had very specific conditions which can’t really be replicated elsewhere.
To be fair if they tried that Islamists would have just taken over. Those things don’t tend to just form on their own when you let people do whatever they want without supervision (you need very specific conditions).
The most effective path for countries in similar positions is probably balanced authoritarianism + focus on education and economic growth and then starting to introduce democracy and other civil rights gradually after a generation or two. Pretty hard to pull off, though (especially in the Muslim world).
> extremism in the form of salafi Wahhabism isn’t common in the country
It’s not like the SA government (as a whole) was ever particularly that keen about the extremism part. Fundamentally they are not that different from Iran in most ways. They started from very different positions of course (secularism never having been a thing in the Arabian peninsula). SA is at least kind of moving into the right direction in some areas when it comes to women’s rights (even if at an extremely slow pace).
Sure, there are more details. Fundamentally that doesn’t change anything at all that much. At no point in the conflict Russia had any interest in a peaceful solution or actually protecting the Russian speaking population in East Ukraine (the opposite, they just wanted to turn them into some sort of perverse “martyrs”. Then again not particularly surprising considering that the Russian society is effectively a deranged death cult..)
Regardless, his movies/tv shows always involved massive amounts of editing and manipulation.
Like the time they portrayed some random (Christian) Palestinian as a leader of a Islamist terrorist brigade which supposedly had a huge negative impact on his life.
Just this incident alone shows that Sacha Baron Cohen is a horrible and a despicable person.
Usually people are talking about the 60s-80s when sharing these stories since that’s what grandparent/parent generations remember. USSR did experience significant growth at least at the beginning of this period and most of that theft/embezzlement was certainly committed to later sell/exchange those goods for profit (e.g. working at coffee shops was were lucrative since you could just reuse the same ground coffee for 5+ cups and steal the rest).
I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say, unions shouldn’t ever comment on decisions they disagree with because they are not helping anyone?
> either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say
Or openly criticize those decisions if they have the guts for that?
Also having “core founding principles” doesn’t mean that they are valid or that you got them right from the beginning.