Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

From a posting by V3.co.uk. I've bolded the key part:

The surviving workers from the Bletchley Park cryptography unit are to be honoured, nearly 70 years after the unit was formed.

The Bletchley Park code breakers, known as Station X during the Second World War, were never officially recognised for their invaluable work in deciphering German, Italian and Japanese military codes – work this is thought to have shortened the war by more than two years and saved millions of lives.

All staff were banned under the Official Secrets Act from even discussing the location of their military service until the 1970s and the site itself was nearly dismantled in the interests of secrecy. Winston Churchill called the staff "my geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled".

Now, at long last, military and civilian workers will receive a special commemorative badge from the government in recognition of their vital war work.

“These people made an enormous contribution to the outcome of World War Two, the 20th century and freedom in the West,” said Simon Greenish, director of the Bletchley Park Trust.

“After many years of having to keep their critical wartime work top secret, it is tremendous that this contribution has finally achieved recognition.”

Heroes of Bletchley included Tommy Flowers, who built one of the world’s first programmable computers, Colossus, largely using his own funds, and Dr Alan Turing, who designed the bombe cryptanalysis machines.

Flowers received an MBE and an award of £1,000 for his work while Turing was arrested for homosexuality in 1952 and committed suicide shortly afterwards, having received no official recognition for his work in his lifetime.

Foreign secretary David Miliband said: “I am delighted that the vital and secret work of Bletchley Park in the Second World War is being recognised.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to all who served at Bletchley Park and its outstations. I am proud to acknowledge their ingenuity, skill and determination, which helped our country in its time of greatest need.”

A good biography of Turing is Andrew Hodge's Alan Turing: The Enigma. It is pretty clear that Turing suffered from two conditions that caused his ostracism: Asperger syndrome and homosexuality. Turing was good enough to save the UK (and the West) but he wasn't good enough to not be hounded to death by the sexist retrogrades in the UK government. Tragedy.

In the end we all turn to dust, so in a sense it doesn't matter that Turing suffered cruel injustices during his life. But for those of us living it does matter to see injustice perpetuated. Sadly power rests too often in the hands of narrow-minded people unable to see the bigger picture. Stadtluft macht frei (City air makes one free). Traditionally urban areas are more cosmopolitan. People rub elbows with a greater variety of people and therefore tend to be more tolerant of differences. The "provincials" lived their smug lives not exposed to new thinking so they became hidebound in their beliefs. Turing was a victim of provincial, puritanical beliefs. Especially the belief that you have a right to take your private morals (in this case religious morals) and force them on others.

Here's another example of provincial thinking: the tendency to extrapolate a current problem into a doomsday prediction.

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