Man is a two-legged animal without feathers and ungrateful.
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I don’t know how paradox it sounds what I’m about to tell you, but history is written by the losers, not the winners.
The winners are usually people of average brightness who lack vision and imagination, immensely average beings that build castles upon their very mediocrity.
They cultivate mediocrity wherever they are, enrich it with hatred about everything unprecedented and they win.
They are easily followed by the mob, because they see in Them, their own selves, they understand that they can also be Great, Winners, without exerting themselves.
In this ocean of mediocrity and backwardness, the defeat of those who dare to defend anything new, is inevitable.
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Does anyone remember the names of Socrates’ accusers? Yet, it’s them who won and murdered him – and the mob applauded.
“Barabbas or Jesus?” asked Pontius Pilate. “Which one do you want me to release to you?”
“Are you joking?” yelled the crowd. “Barabbas is one of us. The other is a threat.”
(This is the last time that I refer to Jesus as a part of human mythology, and I couldn’t care less if he really existed, if he was a gifted man or about his hypostatic union. If you feel like straining at a gnat and swallowing the camel, it’s your call. Your religious convictions, my atheist and theist friends, are the camel that will stick to your throat).
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In the throat of some other defeated fellow stuck a piece of an apple, just like it happened to Snow White; and the wicked witch was not his stepmom, it was his nation, it was the entire humanity to which he offered more than all of the accusers, castigators and mediocrities combined.
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Alan Turing was not a mediocrity. He was immensely innovative like a supernova that explodes and illuminates the universe with its energy.
Genius, uncommonly genius but also eccentric, honest to the bone, to the point of stupidity and perhaps a bit asperger.
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I am not going to spend too much time about his achievements. You can find innumerous articles on the internet, but I heartily recommend you to read the book of Andrew Hodges “Alan Turing: The enigma”.
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In case his name doesn’t ring a bell to you, let me tell you that he was the man who laid the foundations of the computer science. He was an exceptional mathematician and defined the principles of artificial intelligence (thus, contributing to the understanding of the most complicated riddle, the human brain).
A rudimentary and incomplete research on morphogenesis that he did supplied new evidence to biology.
Whatever Turing came to grips with, he did it magnificently, paving new ways.
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For those who hold the view that science has nothing to offer unless it is useful, let me tell you that WWII ended sooner thanks to Turing, therefore millions of lives were spared.
Let us tell the story like a fairy-tale: The Nazis dominated the Atlantic with their submarines. They had a cipher machine named Enigma that no one could decipher; at least that’s what they thought.
Turing, along with his associates “solved the Enigma”. The allies knew the accurate position of each submarine and took them out. That was the first British victory. They triumphed over Germans at sea.
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Turing was awarded the OBE by King George VI but it should remain a secret, since he was working for the Counterintelligence.
A few years later, they told him to stick it right up his ass (excuse me for the foul language).
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Turing was a genius, he was useful but he had one major “vice”: He was homosexual.
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In 1952 (when millions of people were still alive thanks to his genius) the Crown turned against him.
Turing had a brief fling with a youth. When he realized that his house was robbed, he called the police in the belief that the culprit was that precise lover.
The detectives who were appointed to carry out the investigation soon figured out that they had to do with a bigger scoop than the robbery. They questioned Turing about his relationship with the young suspect and he (being honest to the point of stupidity as I have already said) proceeded to give all the details, while offering them tea.
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Shortly after, accusations for homosexuality were substantiated against him. In the trial, all of his colleagues and associates testified in his favour. Without him, the project would have failed.
The judges, mediocrities as all accusers usually are, were indifferent about Turing’s skills and contribution.
Since he accepted the charges (about homosexuality), showing no sign of repentance, he was offered two choices: imprisonment or chemical castration.
Chemical castration is the administration of antiandrogen drugs via injection that would reduce the (so dangerous) libido and render him impotent.
Turing opted for the second choice, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to carry on his researches.
One of the side effects was breast enlargement. Turing got breasts!
Indeed, (and that was the most perverted of all) his prosecutor maintained that the enlargement of his breast would help homosexual Turing to fully grasp his mistake!
I used the exclamation mark because I fail completely to fathom the prosecutor’s thinking: how could you ever “help” a homosexual to be cured from his illness by feminizing him?
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Turing fell into depression, but he tried to overcome the situation. When the treatment came to an end, that is at the end of his penalty, he was implanted a hormonal “balloon”, which would kept on secreting oestrogens.
(That’s right, all these things happened in the UK of 1953, not in Orwell’s 1984).
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Turing committed suicide one year later.
Some maintain that the cause of his deed was not the “treatment”. Some maintain that he didn’t commit suicide and he was just careless.
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Next to his body was found a bitten apple laced with cyanide. Turing’s favourite fairy tale was “Snow White” but Alan (just like Snow White) left no suicide note. Also, some said, that he was particularly joyful the days before his suicide (or accident).
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I don’t feel like straining at a gnat. It makes no difference if Turing committed suicide or if it was an accident.
What does matter (the camel) is that a genius man who offered so much and had even more to give, was castrated by mediocrities (detectives, judges, queens).
Just recently, in 2013, 60 years later, the Crown granted him a posthumous pardon!
Instead of apologizing to humanity for the crime they committed, the mediocrities granted him a pardon for his homosexuality.
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Yet the loser is the winner. He shaped history. The fact that we can communicate on the internet is partly thanks to this homosexual.
(Some say that Apple’s logo, the bitten apple, is a tribute to the “Snow White of the Computers”).
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The detectives who sent him to the court are probably dead. If they live, no one gives a damn about them. The judges who convicted him might be dead. The queen will die soon.
But Turing, a castrated homosexual, will always be a part of our life; every time we press a key at the keyboard.
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