Alan Turing May Receive His Long Awaited Due

[Guest ncm2169]

Posted on Daily KOS by DarkSyde

 

Wed Sep 09, 2009 at 07:16:02 AM PDT

 

If the name Alan Turing rings a bell, it's probably because of the Turing Test. But creating the famous Artificial Intelligence mind experiment was only one of Turing's many accomplishments. In WW2, it was Turing who cracked the Nazi code, saving countless lives and bringing the brutal war to an earlier end. He went on to become the father of the computer age. Turing invented the program, what we call software today, and laid the cornerstones for a network that connected defense computers by phone lines that would one day be called the Internet. Today, as you type on your keyboard, populate spreadsheets, and surf the web, you will be working on a modern incarnation of Turing's devices. How was this visionary genius treated by the western civilization he so ably helped preserve and enrich?

His reward for that? He was prosecuted for being a homosexual, stripped of his security clearance, and subjected to chemical castration. He killed himself two years later.

Finally, half a century after his death, the British government is being heavily petitioned to issue a formal apology and posthumous 'pardon' for their appalling treatment of Alan Turing. Long overdue, and richly deserved at the very least.

We condemn the post WW2 British government for their inexcusable, barbaric actions. But as any political junkie knows, that bigotry and hatred still burns bright, it lingers right into present day, and is not confined to the United Kingdom. If certain political opportunists and exploiters of religion had their way, millions of Americans, including our own Bill in Portland Maine and the hundreds of other GLBT Kossacks who make Daily Kos the amazing and inclusive online community that it is, would live their entire lives in dread and fear, or staring at the bleak walls of a prison cell ... just for loving a fellow human being who happens to possess an 'unauthorized' chromosome. Crazy.

[MsGuy]

British PM Gordon Brown just issued an apology for the "appalling" way Turing was treated. Turing, a man who Churchill stated made the single greatest contibution to Allied victory in WWII, committed suicide after being chemically castrated in 1952 following his prosecution for homosexuality. Turing's work on the German Enigma Code machine was critical to Montgomery's victory in North Africa, to the suppression of u-boats in the North Atlantic and to Allied operations in Europe after the D-day landings in Normandy.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8250592.stm

[Guest DuchessIvanaKizznhugg]

This is good movement forward

 

Has Turing's story been made into a movie or play?

[+ purplekow]

I have seen a fictionalized version of his story on film but I cannot recall the name. It was a British film. There is a love interest for whom he was no interest but friendship. I will search the cobwebs of my mind for the name.

[AdamSmith]

How unspeakably gratifying to see Western governments catching up with Karol Wojtyla's apology for the Church's persecution of Galileo.

[Guest DuchessIvanaKizznhugg]

True

 

How unspeakably gratifying to see Western governments catching up with Karol Wojtyla's apology for the Church's persecution of Galileo.

 

Fortunately, they are running about 300 years ahead of that schedule

[AdamSmith]

Fortunately, they are running about 300 years ahead of that schedule

 

I am no friend of Rome. Nonetheless, considering Western democracies' advantages, I would say the PM is running at least that far behind.

[MsGuy]

One wonders if the apology could have been framed to include the roughly 100,000 other English men who were prosecuted under that law.

[imrthr]

One wonders if the apology could have been framed to include the roughly 100,000 other English men who were prosecuted under that law.

 

What about Oscar Wilde? He was sent to prison for being gay.

[alanalt]

How does one apologize to dead people?

 

I majored in history and retain a deep and abiding interest in it and the way it has shaped (and shapes) our current society... BUT I must confess I really scratch my head when it comes to the value or goal of these kinds of apologies.

 

A government offering an apology (and even redress) to people still living who were directly harmed by its actions is one thing and, generally, I can support them. I'm thinking here of apologies by the Canadian government in the 1980s to Japanese-Canadians who were interned in WW2, or the more recent apology to natives who suffered abuse that was systemic in the residential schools programs in Canada. But in both those cases, plenty of the people who had been actually impacted by those events were still alive and able to accept (or not, as they choose) to accept the 'closure' offered by an apology.

 

But in this case, Turing's long since dead and so (I presume) is his immediate family, so I really wonder about the 'value' of an apology in this case. Either, you're outraged at the treatment Turing received in the 1950s at the hands of a government that may well have owed its very existence to him - or you're not. I can't see the epilogue that 55 years after his death the British government apologized for his treatment will change the hearts and minds of people on this issue.

 

Nor was Turing the only person to have suffered such treatment, as MSGuy has pointed out - tens of thousands of Britons were similarly charged, prosecuted and convicted under a law that was consigned to oblivion decades ago... And if it's publicity one is looking for (i.e. to get Turing's story better known), then it seems to me one should be talking to the folks in Hollywood rather than an unpopular Prime Minister who is clinging desperately to power... A press release from Gordon Brown, even if it is carried on the BBC, isn't likely to gain much attention from people, who didn't already know the story...

 

To my mind, an apology requires one of the parties has to have been actually alive and involved for it to have sincerity or meaning and that's just not the case here.

 

Alan

[MsGuy]

Alan:

 

Turing's neice, Inagh Payne, accepted an behalf of his family. She knew him as a teenager, although his troubles were kept hidden from her by her parents.

 

I think the office of a general apology is not only to correct past wrongs. It serves to put the past injustice out of the bounds of civilized behavior and as a pledge that such injustice will never be allowed to recur.

 

It's all symbolic, to be sure, but it's by such symbols societies live.

[uwsman2]

Turing the story

 

There is at least one big, well-written biography of Turing, The Enigma, and it was made into a terrific play that ran on Broadway with Derek Jacobi as Turing.

 

The good payoff of this apology is that the story surfaces again and so once again people are reminded of the barbarity with which the British treated the subject of homosexuality in those benighted days after World War II, when the survival of the British Empire was due in large part to the efforts of a shy, sweet-tempered and brilliant gay man who was then hounded to suicide. Not that things were so much better in the U.S. at that time, but it is interesting to note that not long after the Turing suicide, the British Parliament set up a committee to investigate the subject of sex crimes which eventually recommended the decriminalization of gay sex, which came by legislation in the 1960s. By contrast, in the U.S., we still had state sodomy laws until 2003, when the Supreme Court overturned the last remaining ones.

 

But to get back to Turing, it is an absolutely fascinating story. All of us benefit from his intellectual breakthrough every time we boot up our computers....

[MsGuy]

There is at least one big, well-written biography of Turing, The Enigma..

 

Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: the Enigma, maintains a website with a plethora of details about Turing's life and work. The scope of his pioneering work both in mathematics and in computer science (and physics! even biology!!) is mindboggling.

 

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

[Guest DuchessIvanaKizznhugg]

Thanks, MsGuy...

 

Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: the Enigma, maintains a website with a plethora of details about Turing's life and work. The scope of his pioneering work both in mathematics and in computer science (and physics! even biology!!) is mindboggling.

 

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

 

...for posting this superb website. It's great having a new site to sleuth through. You are right...the scope of his pioneering is mindboggling.

 

What else might he have accomplished if he had been honoured vs. vilified???