British government betrayed its hero

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and JOE AUCIELLO The Imitation Game, a film biography directed by Morten Tyldum, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly. D lent fictionalized film biography, “The Imitation irector Morten Tyldum has crafted an excel­ Game,” based on the book, ”Alan Turing: The Enigma,” by Andrew Hodges. The film portrays Turing as an in­ telligent though troubled man, whose complex handbuilt machine—a precursor to today’s computer— broke the Nazi enigma code, and is thought to have shortened the war by two years.

The film is set mostly at Bletchley Park, Britain’s government code and cipher school, hidden behind iron gates bearing the misleading plaque, “Radio Manufacturing.” Commander Denniston (the talented, ubiquitous, British actor Charles Dance) heads it up.

Based on his reputation as a mathematical genius, Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is up for an Academy Award) is interviewed by Denniston to join a team of mathematicians in the Hut, an out­ building where they work to break the code. These initial scenes depict Turing as a serious, cerebral, nononsense man who doesn’t realize he is disrespectful when he lets people know that he believes them to be incompetent ignoramuses. He understands neither irony nor sarcasm.

The Germans change the code every day to a mind-boggling 159 million, million, million, million settings, forcing Turing and his frustrated team to restart their calculations. He figures that working out the code manually as they had been doing would take an as­ tonishing 20 million years. Instead, he will build a ma­ chine to break Germany’s enigma, he tells them.

A harbinger of the Cold War anti-Communist hys­ teria weaves throughout the film as a parallel plot involving the suspicion that Turing is a Russian spy, radicalized by the Soviets at Cambridge. In a flash forward to the early 1950s, he reports that his apart­ ment was broken into and things were messed up, but nothing was missing. Still the police believe Turing is hiding something, and they are determined to find it.

Turing hires Joan Clarke (a believable Kiera Knight­ ly) because she solved his crossword puzzle under the allotted time of six minutes. Since Clarke was a woman, no one believed that she could solve it. Once hired, and thought to be a secretary, she is initially de­ nied entrance to the Hut. Even then, she is relegated to bunk with the female administrators and secretaries in another building.

Turing and Clarke enjoy a copacetic relationship.

video and photographic “evidence.” In­ ternal NYPD documents, including a list of 28 “ancestries of interest,” demon­ strated that the police targeted people on the basis of their ethnic background and Muslim faith. his behalf, but they did not. The nation that Turing helped to protect could have protected him. The man who kept secrets for his government was betrayed by a government that refused to keep his secret.

Yet, at the same time, the British government was quite willing to shield a real traitor—one of their own. The Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII, prior to his abdication in 1936 and marriage to Mrs. Wallis Simp­ son) was a partisan of the Nazi regime before and dur­ ing World War II and an admirer of Hitler.

The Duke aided the Axis cause in a number of ways. Prior to the war, Edward told an Italian diplomat that the Allies had broken the Italian intelligence codes. After war was declared, when Luftwaffe bombs fell on London, the Duke passed strategically significant military and political information to the German High Command and continued to the best of his ability to aid the Nazi cause.

The British and American governments were well aware of the Duke’s treasonous activities but merely shunted him aside. As punishment, in the 1940s, he was appointed governor of the Bahamas, and ulti­ mately retired to a quiet life in Paris, where he died in 1972, fondly remembered throughout the world as the man who gave up the British crown for true love.

Alan Turing, who had been arrested on charges of “gross indecency” and hounded to his death, had long since been forgotten. Only in recent years have many posthumous honors been awarded Turing for his “fantastic contribution to the war effort.” n faith for discriminatory policing, simply because a handful of totally unrelated ad­ herents committed criminal acts. Painful historical lessons remind us that courts should not sanction such overt discrimi­ nation by law enforcement, even in times of fear.”

Statements by the appeals court judges on Jan. 13 indicate that they understand these concerns. Judge Julio Fuentes, one of the three judges hearing the appeal, said that he would not wish to attend a mosque if it were under police surveil­ lance. Judge Thomas Ambro stated that, in his opinion, under the NYPD’s crite­ ria for spying, “you’re not just following those who are persons of interest. You’re following everyone.”

According to the CCR, it could take several months for the judges to rule on whether the case should be sent back to district court. n with the “legal” weapons that are today being system­ atically put into place, U.S. capitalism must resort to repression of a magnitude never before seen in this country as its only “solution” to the rise of mass work­ ing-class resistance. We expect that such resistance will arise since U.S. capitalism, which is enveloped by crisis, has no alternative to its present course of steadily imposing austerity measures against work­ ers and all oppressed people.

Only the united and conscious mobilization of the hundreds of millions of capitalism’s victims, in the U.S. and worldwide, can pose a serious alternative— an alternative aimed at ending the system’s inherent need to oppress and exploit in the interests of the ruling-class “one percent.”

The rule of the 99 percent—in which the work­ ing class in all its manifestations, in all its nationali­ ties and racial groupings, rules democratically and through its own institutions—can open the door to a bright new society, a socialist world. n