|
Turing was a soldier. His mind was sharp as a blade. That's why the English government/military was involved with him. Infantry soldiers joke about the army owning you: giving you a fine for damaged government property, when you burn yourself for forgetting your issued sun block. Turing's work caused death and saved lives of soldiers. Turing was a privileged scientist with clearance, interesting to foreign militaries, largely funded by his military, and with access to secret compute and information. Later in life, he was getting involved with very young, stray, men. He had his apartment broken into. He was beaten up. Due to the common societal position on homosexuality at the time, and Russian agencies employing certain tactics, there was legit concern that one of the top UK soldiers was the target of sexpionage and blackmail. You could say Turing showed disgraceful behavior as a military servant with damaging information should it fall into the wrong hands (we would still not accept senior military people sleeping around with homeless Eastern-European teenagers and inviting them home, besides for maybe the commander in chief). Next to the UK driving him to suicide, like you allude to, there is even the hypothesis that either Russia or the UK killed him and made it look like a suicide, to tie up loose ends, very similar to the death of Gareth Williams (supposedly suicided by crawling into a bag and closing the zipper), where BDSM and cross-dressing kinks, not homosexuality, was the angle. Some things never change, unless we remove all sexual taboos. But let's celebrate the mind, for all of that does not even matter. He was also a great scientist (while a poor judge of Islam cults: His Turing test paper is supported by his outrageous invention that Islamists believe that women have no soul, but times were different back then, so I can forgive that). |