http://sarahmaidofalbion.blogspot.com/2008/03/losing-paradice.html
Another reason for mentioning Fiji is that it provides us with a very good example of of how fragile an indigenous culture is, and how vulnerable an indigenous people can be when faced with an aggressive, or ambitious, immigrant race.
A great damage done to the Fijian people was partly due to a charming if unfortunate national characteristic, namely the total lack of the Puritan work ethic, and also due to one of the very few acts of Empire for which the sometime British Colonial rulers of Fiji could justifiably feel a pang of guilt.
Towards the end of the 19th century, having discovered that the average, culturally laid back Fijian will seldom do today what can be put off until tomorrow, the British imported a number of Asians to Fiji to work in the sugar cane and copra plantations (why does an image of a Pacific Empire Windrush spring to mind?) and set in motion an inevitable chain of events which led to the problems which now beset those troubled Islands.
As we have seen happen elsewhere in the world, not least in Britain, over the ensuing years, the Asian community in Fiji made heroic and spectacularly successful efforts in terms of increasing their numbers and producing a rapidly growing Fijian Asian population, which, according to the 2007 census now amount to almost 37% of the total Fijian population.
In common with their kin folk elsewhere in the world, the Fijian Asians are a very ambitious and industrious race of people, especially by comparison to the less driven Fijians, and consequently by the end of the 1990s, not only did they own and run most of the businesses in Fiji, but Fiji had an Indian prime minister and an Indian dominated parliament. This has led to considerable ethnic tension in Fiji, and has resulted in a series of no less than four coup attempts in the last two decades most famously the one in 2000 led by the charismatic George Speight which attempted to ensure that power remained in the hands of ethnic Fijians.
Ominously, given what we may soon see in Europe, this act of ethnic preservation was viewed as akin to heresy in the politically correct world of the 21st Century. International outcry followed, and Fiji found itself (albeit briefly) expelled from the Commonwealth as punishment for its inexcusable racism. George Speight, a man who, although flawed, had acted in defence of his own people, was (bizarrely) tried for treason and sentenced to death, although that sentence was later commuted. Speight's fate is a warning to national patriots elsewhere in the world that those who love their country and their people face a deadly enemy.
An uncomfortable truce now exists in Fiji whilst a resentful and nervous indigenous population watch helplessly as, month by month, year by year, they lose more and more power within their own land, in the full knowledge that any attempt to prevent the gradual theft of their homeland will instantly result in international condemnation.
This is not how the media have chosen to report events in Fiji, but it is what has actually happened, and we can see parallels to the Fiji experience all over the world, not least in Europe.
We in Britain would do well to note the fate of that tiny Island race, with a unique and vibrant culture , and wonder whether it delivers in a scaled down form, a warning of what could happen to us. The Fijians are black, we are white, but that is where the difference ends, Fiji is their land, Britain is ours and those who seek to deny those truths are liars.
