The Imitation Game Today

Peter Hitchens writes:

Crowds are flocking to see the laughable new film about the computer genius Alan Turing The Imitation Game.

I think they are  mainly women besotted with Benedict Cumberbatch, though some men may enjoy the sight of Keira Knightley got up as a 1940s intellectual sexpot.

It’s the usual hopeless attempt to recreate the past by dressing the cast in acres of tweed, making them all smoke and renting some ancient cars.

But the ending is genuinely horrible. The homosexual Turing is shown robbed of his mental powers by hormone drugs supposedly intended to make him ‘normal’.   

We can all shudder at this stupid and wrong treatment.  But it is easy to condemn the follies of the past.

At the time, fashionable opinion believed Turing’s ‘chemical castration’ was a humane alternative to prison.

What similarly stupid things do we believe today? How about this?

Despite growing medical doubts (a report this week said it had more to do with drug marketing than medicine), we dope huge numbers of children with pills very similar to illegal amphetamines.

This mass-doping is justified by the suspect ‘diagnosis’ of an alleged complaint called ‘ADHD’.

If Alan Turing were a child now, I think it pretty likely that his ‘odd’ behaviour would lead him to be drugged in this way, killing his special talents.

It seems to me very probable that, as you read this, some potential genius is having his life blighted, forced by smiling adults to swallow pills to make him ‘normal.

We can see this was wrong in 1953. Why can’t we see it is wrong now?

He goes on:

How can it possibly be balanced for the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme to run an uncritical, near-reverent commercial for cannabis, as it did on Wednesday?

This is not a joke. People who take this drug can end up in locked wards for the rest of their lives.

Who was responsible?