“Great” Britain “Pardons” War Hero Alan Turing 61 Years After Driving Him to Suicide

Alan Turing is the late British mathematician who arguably made a greater material contribution to Britain's war effort than any other single individual (Churchill included, whose contributions were rhetorical, which served to steel the public's resolve and boost morale- that is, non-material- and bad ideas for military campaigns). Turing was key in breaking the Germans' Enigma code, a crucial advantage in defeating Nazi Germany. The Allies were able to decode and read the Germans' military communications as a result. Turing also was a path-breaking computer scientist.

In 1952 Turing was exposed as homosexual and criminally prosecuted by the ungrateful British government. Duly convicted of the heinous crime of having sex with men (also a religious offense under Christian ideology, despite the prevalence of homosexual church bosses in Britain), the British legal system magnanimously allowed Turing to choose his own punishment, from a menu provided by them, of course: imprisonment, or chemical castration by enforced administering of estrogen.

Turing went with castration, a violent assault on one's being, and two years later committed suicide by ingesting cyanide. He was 41. [1]

Several years ago, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown “apologized” for the wrong that was done by the ingrate British establishment to the man who helped them win a war of national survival. I'm sure that made Turing's corpse feel better.

Now, finally, after years of pressure (mainly embarrassing PR), the British power structure has decided to “pardon” Turing. Like he needs their forgiveness. They're the ones who need to be pardoned. Thus their "Queen" [bee] has performed the formality of issuing a pardon.

Of course, since he's dead, this does no good at all, except to salve the bad consciences of the successor British elite. The actual guilty parties are now all dead or retired. (If Britain really wanted to repudiate its awful, bigoted past, maybe they should put them on trial.)

But I'm being a tad too negative here. What good it does is it repudiates official homophobia. That's a positive. It says the Government shouldn't have persecuted a man for being homosexual- at least if that man was a war hero. (No word on pardons for other gays victimized by the British government and criminalized for their private sex lives. Under a recent law, some are allowed to beg for pardons, which of course requires effort and expense on their parts.)

There has also been a push to “pardon” British soldiers executed in World War I for “desertion:” shell-shock victims who left the hellish trenches. (Their moron generals kept feeding them into a meat-grinder year after year, making suicidal charges into machine gun and artillery fire, and other insanities.)

Pardons? Gee, I don't know, it's only been 95 years, are you sure enough time has passed yet to “forgive” those “cowards”?

P.S.: Here in the U.S.A., in the year 2013, The Great State of Utah has just made three attempts to get an “emergency” stay of a Federal District Court ruling invalidating Utah's ban on gay marriage as Unconstitutional. (That would be the U.S. Constitution. Each of the fifty states has its own state Constitution, which are supposed to be superceded by the Federal one where they conflict.) Yeah, that's an “emergency,” alright. Can't let gays get married. More people getting married would simply DESTROY the “institution” of marriage!

Six Utah counties are defying the Federal Court ruling and refusing to abide by it. In the rest of Utah, 700 gay couples have married in the past three days. Quick, Mormons! Get a stay! Stop them from marrying! “Defend” marriage! (Mormons, a weird, power-hungry cult to which Mitt Romney belongs, rules Utah.)

1]  Some suspect that the British secret police may have murdered Turing. I do not have sufficient information to affirm this. However, given the sinister nature of Western secret police forces, which all are dominated by fascists at their cores, who also violently hate homosexuals, and given that this was the 1950s, we cannot rule the possibility out. Memoirs I have read of some British secret policemen of that era make clear how rabid they were. They even put the serving head of MI6 under investigation, believing their own boss to be a Soviet mole based on the fact that he wasn't a violently deranged fascist as they were. Turing's security clearance was pulled, and it may have been felt that leaving him alive was a "security risk," given his knowledge of "sensitive" information.