Alan Turing-HERO

[herman2]

From The Toronto Sun Newspaper

This article relates to RS’s thread about better late than never, but in this case, the poor guy will never know that the government gave him an apology-Too Late Too sad in this case.
…The article notes that the government FORCED hormone drugs on the guy to reduce his homosexuality. Hitler killed Homosexuals but the issue of Homosexuality wasn’t really that free in England either!

LONDON — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized for the “inhumane” treatment of the Second World War code-breaker Alan Turing.
The mathematician Turing helped crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma communications code — a turning point in the war.
But he was later convicted of gross indecency for having sex with a man and forcibly treated with female hormones to reduce his sex drive. Homosexuality was then illegal in Britain.
Turing committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.
Brown’s apology, published Friday in The Daily Telegraph newspaper and the prime minister’s office Web site, follows an Internet petition that attracted more than 30,000 signatures.
Brown said Turing “truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war.”
“The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely,” he said.
Brown said Turing was “in effect, tried for being gay.”
“We’re sorry, you deserved so much better,” he said.
Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said the apology was “most welcome and commendable.”

[Rising_Sun]

One of the worst features of modern assessments of past events, and the greatest perversion of historical objectivity, is to judge them by current standards.

If WWII was fought on the same basis as the absurdly restrictive ‘rules of engagement’ in modern ‘wars’ of the delicate kind in which the West currently engages then hardly anyone would have got hurt. :rolleyes:

And if WWII was fought on the same basis as the current and highly commendable rules concerning compensation for killed and injured soldiers then it would have ended in 1940 under the burden of the compensation due to the French and British soldiers, not to mention the Poles, for deaths and injuries to that point.

On current as distinct from 1950’s standards: As for Turing being a poofter, who cares?

If contemporary attitudes hadn’t been so stupidly hostile to poofters and made them shameful then there wouldn’t have been any reason to regard them as security risks.

I remember being castigated with considerable enthusiasm in a closed session by a senior officer from an intelleigence agency during a security lecture in the early 1970s, when I was responsible for some rather sensitive defence matters, for expressing a similar view.

He was, of course, correct at the time that being a poofter made poofters susceptible to blackmail.

I consider that I remain correct then and now in believing that if society accepted male and female homosexuals as ordinary members of society instead of regarding them as something special because of their sexual orientation (and if some some poofters of both genders accepted that they’re nothing special either and learned to shut the fuck up about how special they are and why they need special treatment and rights) then there would be no grounds to blackmail them.