this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Alan Turing was a fucking hero, and the British legal system drove him to suicide (infosec.pub)
submitted 6 days ago by PugJesus@piefed.social to c/historymemes@piefed.social
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[–] Sunshine@piefed.social 16 points 6 days ago (2 children)

All that work for a bigoted country.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

All that work to stop the Nazis from conquering the whole of Europe and continuing their genocide, you mean?

[–] ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

Are you suggesting that the perfect and the good should not be enemies? I sure hope not, because that would be offensive.

[–] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Yeah such a bigoted country where the choice of punishment was prison time or chemical castration, unlike Germany at the time where being gay meant... (checks notes) being sent to a concentration camp, worked brutally literally to the bone, and then gassed to death.

Let's also not forget other bigoted countries at the time like, to pick a purely random example, Canada. Homosexuality still criminalised until 1969 (2 years after the UK decriminalised it) where the punishment was 10 years to life in prison.

Strange; similar prison terms for the UK at the time. I wonder if there's some reason why Canada and the UK had almost identical laws until 1931.

Anyway, this still doesn't justify the mistreatment of Alan Turing or any other member of the LGBTQ+ community at the time, after decriminalisation (see the whole story of Stonewall and places like Canal Street), or even now with the bullshit bathroom laws.

The best thing we all can do is learn from history and fight tooth and nail for the future. Because as Regan, Maggie, and Trump have shown us, some fuckers want to drag us backwards, and I for one, am not going to let them.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

Homosexual acceptance is a very new thing in the West. Always two steps forward, one back, but I don't think young people can really internalize how bad it was just a couple of decades back.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah such a bigoted country where the choice of punishment was prison time or chemical castration, unlike Germany at the time where being gay meant... (checks notes) being sent to a concentration camp, worked brutally literally to the bone, and then gassed to death.

Turing was convicted after WWII, in 1952. There were no concentration camps back then. Legally, concentration camps have never been a mean of punishment of criminality, like prisons. People were not detained in CCs due to the rule of a court in a criminal case.
In German criminal law, homosexuality between men (aged over 21) was punished with up to 10 years prison in 'severe cases'. Which was the official legislation from the Nazi era (1935) present until 1969.

https://www.forum-recht-online.de/2005/205/205steinke.htm (in German)

[–] ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm sure it will be of great comfort to the people who died in the camps to learn that their murder by the Nazis was illegal, actually.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 1 points 5 days ago

That's not what I said.