Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
Tuesday 19 March 2024
THE PIECE PLANNED for today had to be postponed after I made an extraordinary discovery which all literate people in Scotland (or anywhere else for that matter) ought to be warned about urgently. I bought a book from Amazon which turns out to have been written using “Artificial Intelligence technology”. Here is what happened.
For reasons connected with the open racism at the top of the Scottish government, I have been researching the boundary between Islamic and black culture which runs through the romantically inaccessible country of Mauritania. The Moors, who are the Arab-Berber ruling class there, control the government and have a long record of persecution of the Africans, who live in the south of the country and were for over a thousand years routinely enslaved by the Moors. Many still are. This is an example of the apartheid that is practiced by the Muslims of Mauritania (and elsewhere). It is described in a long and blistering Human Rights Watch/Africa report, published in 1994, which you can read in its entirety here.
Though matters appear to have improved slightly in the last thirty years since that report was published, the basic use the Islamic rulers made of their power over black Africans was to beat, starve, torture, expel (to Senegal) and sometimes simply kill them. They key to this history is the fact that Arab slavery in Africa lasted longer, was on a larger scale and was more “entrepreneurial” than even European slaving, which relied for much of its “raw material” on people sold to them by Arabs based in the north and east of the African continent.
The source of this human material was debtors, victims of famine plus “victims of wars, slave raids, kidnappers or systems of tribute”, as has been described widely – though those words come from an article on pre-colonial slavery in the Economic History Review. The history of Mauritania is, therefore, not accidental since it lies on the border between Arab-Islamic civilisation and the traditional African one to the south of the Sahara.
Given my interest in the recent introduction of theft of public funds into Scottish government as a commonplace which no longer seems to require any apology, Mauritania looked like the obvious country to investigate in order to get an idea of our own potential future in the event that the UK government continues its limp and ultimately complicit approach to rampant democratic abuses in Holyrood.
Stealing public funds for the gratification of people in power is the financial equivalent of slavery. We work to pay taxes, and those are stolen by people who act as if the money is theirs, which is exactly what slavery involved. ‘Your work is mine, so keep working!’ The product of our labour is taken from us without our consent, and we risk violence (jail) if we try to defend ourselves against the slave masters.
Since Mauritania is perhaps the classic example of the enslavement of native people by invading Ubermenschen who want to get rich at the expense of their defenceless subjects, I went to Amazon to look for a short general history of the country and found this: The History of Mauritania. I started reading, and was disappointed at the bland and clichéd prose which actually told me almost nothing. Phrases like “hauntingly beautiful”, “visually stunning”, “indelible mark” or “enduring symbol” are almost completely meaningless. Most significantly of all, I got to page 58 (out of 104) before I saw any reference to slavery. Since Arab slavery came to north-west Africa with the Muslim invasions from the seventh century on, this was totally misleading.
That was bad enough. Then I read (for the first time) the page inside the front cover which I reproduce here. It said that the book “was created with the help of Artificial Intelligence technology”.
If we are now going to have our books written by AI, then surely we need a huge warning sign on the Amazon page, or in bookshops, to alert readers to the fact that reading them is pointless? I do not trust computer-generated text as a source of information since, being dumb and passive, no computer, however big, clever and expensive, does any more than rearrange what has already been fed into it. I agree with Dr Iain McGilchrist that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, only artificial information.
Which leads on to the problem of our own Moorish-style overclass in government, specifically the way in which it is trying to enslave Scotland by tying us all down with Lilliputian threads (including the Hate Crime Act) while they steal money for whatever purpose, private or public, seems to be cool in the moment. The caravans continue to ply their slow but remorseless way through the Holyrood desert, leading long lines of abject captives to misery, poverty and death, while our First Minister displays not a shred of conscience about the misbehaviour of his Party’s plunderers.
Sadly, Alister Jack does not seem to take the matter seriously either – at least I have seen no outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual remorse for the degeneration of Scottish governance under our greedily Moorish-style masters. Defence of the devolution settlement seems to involve endless appeasement which is not what most Scots of my acquaintance think is the job he is paid to do. Has the idea that plundering is permissible spread even to the Tory Party? Or have both parties subcontracted their political morality to some artificial information machine?
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
Also written by Ian Mitchell is The Justice Factory (second edition): Can the Rule of Law Survive in Twenty-First Century Scotland? which considers the future of liberal democracy, taking Scotland as an example.
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