The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-from.html

by jgrahamc • 17 years ago

78 76 17 years ago

jgc.org

slackenerny5• 17 years ago

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing

How?

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

The Australian government apologized for the treatment of the indigenous people of Australia.

I think apologies matter a lot. Even though Turing is dead and has no family to apologize too, an apology would make a point about how prejudice warps the world.

slackenerny5• 17 years ago

Okay. But how?

yangyang2• 17 years ago

Where do you stop?

Obviously what happened to Turing was wrong. But is it better to concentrate on improving things for the future rather than endlessly looking back at the past?

bitdiddle2• 17 years ago

yes atonement is difficult in this case.

A sad story indeed. If I recall correctly from the biography Turing spent time working at Princeton as Alonzo Church had independently produced the same results so it's really the Church-Turing thesis.

Statues and government apologies don't mean squat. The important thing is to never let the story be forgotten.

michael_dorfman3• 17 years ago

I see the point about "government apologies", but one good way to make sure the story is never forgotten is to name public structures (roads, schools, etc.) after Turing so that his name is always in the public eye.

slackenerny5• 17 years ago

I think people thought for a long time on how to save the story, and not only the name, from being forgotten. Apple's original logo was designed as a such tribute.

scscsc• 17 years ago

The damage has already been done. It is not reversible. Apologies do not mean much usually. They probably mean less than nothing coming from a government.

michael_dorfman3• 17 years ago

I agree that they don't mean much, but I wouldn't say "less than nothing." Rather, I'd say they count for "something slightly more than nothing."

If the government of the UK were to apologize, the story of Turing's mistreatment at the hands of the government would fill a news cycle. It's not much, but it's not nothing.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

...funding a million sterling pounds research institute in his name.

dtf• 17 years ago

Touching fact regarding the statue in Sackville Park: the sculptor's own personal computer, a 20-year old Amstrad CPC, was buried underneath the statue as the "sacrifice".

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

Just googling around, there's a lot of stuff that the British government has to apologize for, but hasn't. Specifically

* Irish Potato Famine

* Acadian Expulsion

I'm sure there's more.

nailer4• 17 years ago

I'm not sure why you're being moderated down. The conditions causing the Potato Famine to have such devastating consequences are known to be a political issue rather than than an ecological one.

Wikipedia has a fairly extensively referenced article on the issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland). See 'Causes and contributing factors'.

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

I generally just assume that it's common knowledge that it was genocide by neglect, and was copied and improved upon by Germanic efficiency 80 years later. As evil as the holocaust was, the groundwork was laid by the British (and Canadians/Americans) the century before.

edw519• 17 years ago

Whether it's Alan Turing, slavery, war crimes, or anything else, the best apology to someone who is dead would be to stop doing the same things to those who are living.

pierrefar• 17 years ago

Agreed 100%.

In this instance, the apology is to stop discriminating based on sexuality.

mynameishere5• 17 years ago

So...you want to remove the added legal protections homosexuals have?

EDIT: No, really? Is that what you want, because that's where the discrimination is.

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

Best apology, yes. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice to actually say something too.

Herring• 17 years ago

The British Government should apologize to a lot of people..

nailer4• 17 years ago

I see your point, but Peter Andre's actually Australian.

yangyang2• 17 years ago

It's not just the government though. If you asked people at the time if what had been done was correct, how many would have said yes?

Attitudes change (for the better in this case). An apology from a government doesn't change history.

bitdiddle2• 17 years ago

there's some truth to this. As a child I recall being taught that some scientists thought hormones could treat homosexuality, as it was considered an illness.

It's amazing how ignorant we were just 50 years ago, and likely still are :)

What's particularly sad about Turing was that he was such a great war hero. We make movies about famous spies capturing machines behind enemy lines, when the reality was largely Turing and I believe a group of polish refugees slaving away in basements building computers.

benmathes• 17 years ago

Well, the spies under the direction of England's SOE (special operations executive) spent a lot of their time cutting transmission lines throughout occupied Europe. This was done so the Germans had to broadcast their signals via wireless, allowing Turing and Bletchley Park to intercept and break them much more often.

I highly recommend a book called Between Silk and Cyanide, written by the head of codes (cryptography) of SOE during World War II.

jlees3• 17 years ago

Captured machines did play a fair part in the codebreaking!

I would say the saddest thing about Turing related to the Government is simply that his work went absolutely unacknowledged for so long. I actually visited Bletchley Park last weekend and a curator told me of a woman in her late eighties who, even now, had an ingrained attitude of "I can't talk about it". (She was a Wren working at Bletchley).

I think it was thirty years or so before anyone even knew the massive contributions this man had made to our science.

ashleyw• 17 years ago

Homosexuality was illegal in many parts of the world at the time, and it was believed to be morally incorrect by citizens (in most cases), just like how the majority of people see cannabis as a very harmful drug today. So if anything, it should be the world apologising, not the British government alone (whos apology would likely be meaningless anyway, due to the change of power since that time.) The same goes for discrimination against women and blacks.

What's done is done, and thankfully we are now open to the thought that we were wrong in our moral standards. And in a lot of cases, we now fight strongly for the rights of people who were once discriminated against.

To me, an apology is only worth something if the person/people apologising had an opinion which conflicted with the general opinion of the population, otherwise who's to say the victim wouldn't have thought the same if he/she was in the same situation? (i.e. not gay.) That's not to say the general populations' opinion was right, but that it can be massively rub off on your own.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

The British Government has been doing terrible things to many, many people all around the world, for many, many years.

If they start apologizing to people one by one... that'll take a while.

gaius2• 17 years ago

I saw that Benjamin Zepheniah on TV, saying the Monarchy should be abolished because the Royal Family had blessed slave ships.

What he didn't bother to say is that pretty much the entire world (including Africans) participated in the slave trade at that time, and that Britain had taken the lead in the fight to stamp out slavery. The first time in history that former slave-holders had fought to free slaves. Literally fought, with warships blessed by the Royals.

So yeah, we've done some terrible things - but on the whole (even under New Labour) the UK is a powerful force for good in the world, and we deserve credit for that. And we're to "undo" the effects of everything we've done... Well let's say that Zepheniah wouldn't be sitting in an air-conditioned TV studio wearing a handmade suit, hatin'.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

You're absolutely right. I just couldn't resist making a very vague reference to the old joke of using machine guns against people armed with kiwis.

albertcardona• 17 years ago

Have you ever heard of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged? He had the same mission ... with negative sign.

(Just kidding.)

Jem• 17 years ago

Given the current problems the British government are having holding the country together, an apology to Alan Turing is NOT something I want them to be thinking about.

Don't get me wrong, I am 100% for gay rights, laws against discrimination, etc (my mum is gay, and is 'married' to her partner), but I think priorities should lie in making life worth living for those still with us at this time.

justin_hancock• 17 years ago

It's not really a good idea is it? The people who perpetrated this are dead, it was under an earlier Government. Further more the whole situation was likely whipped up by the right wing press, Sir John Gielgud's treatment was another appalling example of this. The general populous at the time were not really bothered either way about a person's sexuality.

The best way is to remember him would be to create a large research institution in his honour. Apologizing changes nothing in this instance.

pwoods• 17 years ago

At the very least we should apologize for the chemical castration! WTF is that? Yeah not good.

kingkawn• 17 years ago

Apologize so that successive generations do not have to continue arguing about whether they should.

vixen992• 17 years ago

OK, appeasement is certainly one solution.

vixen992• 17 years ago

Governments do not even hold themselves responsible for the previous adminstration's fiscal measures let alone the laws that were in place generations ago. Nor should they. The dead are dead. Let's expend our energies on being decent to ourselves, the living.

davidw3• 17 years ago

Hrm. Alan Turing was definitely a hacker, and so is jgrahamc, but the resulting discussion here isn't particularly hackery...

tc2• 17 years ago

I scroll down to bottom of these threads just to see where you've reliably complained about them.

davidw3• 17 years ago

Well, then, "hi!". Sometimes I'm at the top of the threads too, because they aren't appropriate:-)

J_McQuade• 17 years ago

You think that's overdue - the Greek government still hasn't apologised to Socrates!

ijuyhgtyu2• 17 years ago

I can't think of anything more insulting than a government that has no interest in science deciding to do a big honoring Turin publicity stunt in the hope of a gain in gay voter support.

There is also considerable doubt that his 'treatment', which had ended a year before, was a cause of his suicide - rather than a feeling that his work wasn't leading anywhere.

lukas• 17 years ago

I'm surprised there's so much negativity about this post. Alan Turing made huge contributions to mathematics and philosophy.

But not only that, he was a war hero. How many other people in the 20th century contributed so much to the world on both practical and theoretical levels?

And the British Government drove him to suicide for no good reason.

I think his story deserves far more recognition.

jcl• 17 years ago

Barely on topic, I know, but the slate statue of Turing at Bletchley Park is really cool: http://www.stephenkettle.co.uk/turing.html

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing

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