Missus O and I popped to see Imitation Game last night.  It's a dramatisation of the Bletchley Park story when a team of friendless geeks cracked the German enigma code, thereby expediting the end of the Second World War.  The breakthrough, which had beaten the finest minds at the allies' disposal for years, was cracked primarily by Alan Turing.

Turing was a fascinating character, not perhaps the kind of man you'd care to share a diving bell with for any great length of time - but a compelling figure for those of us looking back on his life.  He was treated appallingly by the British establishment, in spite of his immeasurable contribution to the country's very existence.  It's generally agreed now that the allies may well have lost the war were it not for the work that Turing oversaw.

So, why then was he treated so badly?  Well, he was (a) spectacularly arrogant and rude ...and... (b) a homosexual.  B was used as the flimsy pretext of his destruction by the powers-that-be because they felt slighted by Turing thanks to 'a'.  In fairness to him, Turing wasn't arrogant.  He was autistic and a genius.  This combination made him cleverer than everyone else on Earth at the time and incapable of telling white lies.  This meant he would tell people that he was cleverer than them and that they needed him if they ever wanted to break the code.  This wasn't arrogance; it was a statement of irrefutable fact.  For Turing, it was like pointing out that night followed day, and he couldn't understand why people took umbrage at his telling them so.

So, he was a difficult man to like.  However, this mitigates not one jot what was done to him.  He was convicted of gross indecency and chemically castrated as a result.  Aside from the wretched heterosexual totalitarianism of this decision, what is worse still is the fact that the treatment destroyed his mind.  He was incapable of ascending the intellectual heights due to the side effects of the hormones he was forced to take.  Think about that for a moment: a genius of Turing magnitude purposely destroyed by a nation that owed its very existence to that genius.  That's the same country that venerates Newton.  Fucking outrageous.

What is more outrageous is the fact that homophobia is still rampant in Britain.  What have we learnt from Turing's persecution?  Precisely nothing.  He was correct in his analysis of the intellectual shortcomings of the rest of humanity, Turing, and they lived down to expectation.  Perhaps that why he killed himself.