Posie Parker and The Battle of The Atlantic

Friday, 24 March 2023

Posie Parker gestures during a Standing for Women protest in Glasgow, Scotland. Her two public speaking engagements in New Zealand have sparked controversy.

Deborah Coddington is a journalist and former ACT MP

OPINION: You may wonder what connection there is between the Battle of the Atlantic, which took place in World War Two, and anti-transgender activist Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker’s visit to Australasia.

Bear with me.

The Axis powers started sinking Allied craft as soon as war was declared in September 1939. The German Kriegsmarine used U-boats to try and destroy merchant ships – and liners – carrying passengers and crucial supplies (oil, meat, wool, dairy, and so on) for the Allies. Nazi Germany’s plan was to starve Britain into defeat.

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The celebrated mathematician Alan Turing.

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Winston Churchill said in hindsight he was “even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain” and “the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril”.

These days there is dispute over how close the Kriegsmarine came to starving us to defeat, but the dreadful death toll portrays the utter madness of conflict: more than 100,000 seamen from Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, India, West Indies, China, and Africa lost their lives in a cruel, cold sea.

But that number would have undoubtedly been so much greater if it had not been for the extraordinary brilliance and dedication of the English-born mathematician Alan Turing. Turing was a genius, to put it mildly, regarded as the person we can thank for – among other things - general purpose computers and artificial intelligence.

During the war he worked at Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park where, long story short, he led the team which cracked the Enigma code and enabled the tracking of Hitler’s submarines fighting their wolf-pack formation in the Atlantic Ocean. This was a game-changer that lopped months off an already drawn-out battle and sent men home to their families instead of to a watery grave.

So Alan Turing was a British hero, right? Wrong. He died nine years after the war ended, aged just 41, a convicted criminal. Why? Because he was homosexual. Instead of being sent to prison, he chose chemical castration but his life nonetheless was miserable. He was treated appallingly and two years later he swallowed cyanide and died in disgrace.

Does this sound like anything? A shunning, much the same way Keen-Minshull and her followers pick on the LGBT community?

The irony of all this is because of courageous people like Alan Turing, attention-seekers like Keen-Minshull are at liberty to shout their hurtful opinions in public, vile though they are. They claim freedom, but does that extend to encroaching on the freedom of others to live their own personal lives, not hurting anyone else?

I don’t believe we should allow individuals into Aotearoa who pre-announce they intend to force harm on the country and its people. There are plenty of others who want to come here, probably queueing for years because they come from some other nation with no proper ‘agreement’ or ‘treaty’ with New Zealand.

Alan Turing was a thoughtful, gentle, caring man who worked on a project to benefit the lives of others. He broke the law when the law, literally was an ass. Freedom of speech is precious, and it’s crucial that we neither marginalise it, nor abuse it, but that doesn’t mean hijacking freedom of speech to cause physical harm. Sticks and stones break bones and names can kill – Alan Turing was just one case, there have been many in the LGBT community who’ve been broken by the wicked words that headline seekers like Keen-Minshull give others licence to voice.

Keen-Minshull owes her liberty in part to Turing. She could pause and consider the difficulties of being ‘different’ instead of making headlines being nasty. She could read the words of Cuban boxer Emile Griffith, former world welterweight champion, ‘illegally’ gay in 1962 when he was taunted as being a “f…” and stepped into the ring blinded with rage. His punches proved deadly for his opponent but this didn’t halt his career.

Nonetheless, guilt haunted his life: “I kill a man and most people forgive me,” he said. “I love a man and many say this makes me an evil person.”