It is always immoral and unjust to penalize current generations for wrongs committed in the past. While it’s true that the past cannot be changed, it’s even more apparent that a doctrine of retribution at the expense of the innocent (like the lamb in La Fontaine’s story, not yet born) is unsustainable both logically and ethically.

Humans are neither logical nor ethical.

The current international situation is dominated by a desire for revenge. In the resurgence of dangerous and primitive religious fanaticism, there’s a spirit of revenge/vengeance, where past errors and misdeeds serve as a model.

It’s as if the crimes of pernicious Christian obscurantism from ten centuries ago could justify today’s degrading violence in the Muslim world. In such a mindset, the crimes of Christianity during the Crusades still make the Western enemy a «crusader.» Justification or pretext, this violence reflects past crimes; those that, on March 12, 2000, led the then-Pope to ask forgiveness for two millennia of crimes against humanity. He had the honesty to acknowledge it, but we are still paying the consequences.

Eight Crusades, between 1099 and 1270, preached by Popes including two named Innocent III and IV (what’s in a name?), were not the only crimes in question during these confessions; in the name of a higher truth, America, Africa, and Asia were evangelized by sword and gunpowder. And a strong sense of victimization persists in the world, intensifying rivalries.

This is history. The local reality is no less instructive. Today’s Mauritians carry the burden of often atrocious errors committed in the past by others, long dead, but still exploitable. For too long, invoking the precedence of the French founders from 1722, their descendants (pure or diluted) believed themselves imbued with French supranationality. July 14 was sacred: celebrated with balls, shows, and champagne; the movement for retrocession, the magic of the «Consulate», the French Alliance among others, illustrated a state of affairs not always harmful but always atavistic and sectarian; and, more seriously, capable of serving as a bad example for the future. Contrary to 55 years of Mauritian sovereignty, the stigmas of «colonization» – in fact, «founding» – or immigration still fuel, on one hand, a vengeful spirit and, on the other, the psychosis of some spoliation under a façade of «democratization.» Ancestors leave us their legacy, unchangeable, for which no one alive today is responsible. We cultivate its evils and prevent them from disappearing because they serve our narrow interests. Thus, on both sides of history, there’s a «mindset» that prevents living in the present, and all the reason of the century does not free us from it.

A good friend used to tell me that Mauritians do not deserve their name. They are still at the stage of «Mauripithecus». The century moves fast, except in its dogmas and prejudices, against which clarity seems weak.

Each alliance has a hidden motive (agenda); each measure has a color. Let’s stop lying and deceiving ourselves. Objectivity is the subjectivity of others.