The passage of thirteen years may have played tricks with my memory. But it seems to me that the kind of people who delight in public displays of moral outrage have been less incensed by George Speight's recent coup in Fiji than they were by the two coups his countryman Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka staged in 1987.
Perhaps it is simply a loss of innocence among the café latte set -- their belated realisation that idyllic Pacific island states are just as likely to degenerate into thuggery and corruption as any other Third World country.
After all, since 1987 we have seen an attempted coup in Vanuatu, the assassination of a government minister in Samoa and a plot to kill a number of other leaders, a long-running and murderous rebellion in Bougainville, a whole smorgasbord of political and military mayhem in the rest of Papua New Guinea, and the extensive criminalisation of politics throughout the region. And earlier this week there was a coup in the Solomons, capping off eighteen months of gruesome ethnic violence which arose out of attempts by indigenous Guadalcanal islanders around Honiara to force settlers from neighbouring Malaita to return to their own island.
So while they still like to haul out the ragged banner of "colonialism" to excuse it all, even the most sentimental members of the "outraged" classes must be feeling drained of some of their righteousness in regards to the Pacific, just as they have become weary of thinking about African politics.
But I suspect there is more to it than a simple matter of coup fatigue. I think there are two main differences between the situation in 1987 and today.
The government that Rabuka ousted in 1987 was a coalition between the Indian-dominated National Federation Party and the multiracial Fiji Labour Party. It was led by Labour's Dr Timoci Bavadra, a rather naïve ethnic Fijian who readily adopted the soft Marxism and hostility to Western nuclear powers that our left-wingers expected of any genuine Third World politician. Bavadra's party had come under the influence of Australian unionists and University of the South Pacific academics who believed that the real struggle in Fiji had to be between the Indian and Fijian working class on one side, and foreign capitalists and their local henchmen on the other.
Rabuka, on the other hand, was the kind of black man who filled the left with dismay. Not only was he strongly anti-Communist and favourably disposed towards Western powers, he also spoke openly of his desire to convert all citizens of Fiji to Christianity -- a project which put him offside with most of the leaders of Australia's churches.
But this time round, the media-wise and articulate George Speight knows that there are certain buttons he can push to neutralise much of the hostility that might otherwise be directed against him.
He has cunningly phrased his attack on parliamentary democracy in terms that few progressive intellectuals can resist -- it is a "Western import", thus raising the hated spectre of cultural imperialism. He also made a nice bow to the multiculturalists, saying that he would "like to encourage" the Indians "to continue to practise their cultures". And he wants to restore the affirmative action programs for indigenous Fijians that the now-captive government of Mahendra Chaudhry had set aside.
But Speight's master stroke was to arrange a press conference for two Maori activists from Aotearoa (or New Zealand as some people still call it), who came to support his role in the common struggle of Fijians, Maoris and Aborigines for indigenous rights. As an added bonus, they denounced every caring person's Great Satan, John Howard, as a "racist". How dare he think that settlers -- whether Indians or Europeans -- should have equal rights with "first peoples"?
And that brings us to the second major difference between the 1987 coups and today. Back then, the notion of special indigenous rights wasn't quite as attractive to the intelligentsia as it has become over the last decade. The fine ideals of universal human rights and a colour-blind society still had their followers, and "racists" were those who believed that people's race or ethnic identity should play a part in determining their civic or legal rights and obligations.
Now of course, all that has been stood on its head. I think that the crucial turnaround came when the socialist light finally petered out at the end of the 1980s. All the tatty dreams of a revolutionary working class that would sweep away the oppressive structures of capitalism and create a wonderfully free and just society had to be abandoned, even in the most third-rate universities.
"Progressives" who once saw an emphasis on racial or ethnic identity as reactionary now celebrate "the politics of difference" as their major weapon against the liberal and democratic capitalist institutions they despise. Indigenous peoples have an honoured place in the new pantheon, as their rhetorical commitment to strengthening their "traditional culture" against the hated forces of "economic rationalism" and "globalisation" meets many of the intelligentsia's own psychological and political needs.
So while they remain wrapped in the "first peoples" mantle, Speight and his thugs can urge Fijians to unite against "our common enemy the Indians", and the Isatabu savages on Guadalcanal can even parade the severed heads of Malaitan migrants without causing too many members of the café latte set to spill their coffee. The dangerous notion of "indigenous rights" has become too precious to be challenged by any critical consideration of the real nastiness to which it can lead.
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