Sometimes a film or book arrives just the right time.

This week at the Errol Flynn cinema the film'The Post' directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks was shown. The film was a story of the struggle by the Washington Post, its owner Catherine Graham and its editor Ben Bradley to publish the Ellsberg papers that exposed the decades long cover-up by American presidents, starting with Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson and then of course Richard M Nixon.
It might be considered a historic film in the context that the Vietnam War that was the subject of the leaked documents is now history and that ubiquitous politicians argument" it's time to move on"Might be considered fitting, the sort of thing politicians and more specifically presidents say when they want to cover up an unpleasant truth.
The evidence that Ellsberg uncovered was shocking, it was clear that in the 4000 page it pages of documents that he smuggled out that presidents since Kennedy had known that the war in Vietnam was a cruel deception of the American people that allowed hundreds of thousands to be injured and killed and the greater number of Vietnamese civilians to be murdered in a war that everyone at the top of the United States government knew was unwinnable.
As the news filtered out that the Washington Post and the New York Times both had the information and were going to publish the pressure from the White House and the Pentagon was ferocious, threats of imprisonment were made by the State Department and the CIA( I have no doubt) t to prevent the publication, the allegation of treachery and intimidation of journalists and publishers of both newspapers never let up stop
It of course all stemmedFrom within the White House where a paranoiac, narcissist and bully was the Republican president, Richard Millhouse Nixon. He was a man didn't trust anyone and who despite having taken an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States strangely appeared to have forgotten that important sentence in the constitution about the rights of free speech.
There are many faults in America but the one thing that is really worth holding onto is the constitution that the founding fathers, in my view the most influential being John Adams and Ben Franklin, not to mention Tom Paine, it was a constitution for its time although the principles are universal. It is true there is the clause which the national rifle association claim if the defence of bearing arms by everyone but then that calls was originally written in order that state militias could defend themselves from the possibility of attack by the British government. But the written constitution of the United States is a fine humanitarian document that deserves to be part, with modifications, of every state that claims to be civilised.

But of course Batman people of America hadn't imagined their criminal like Nixon would ever occupy the White House, of course there had been criminals in their posts earlier but in the main they were the sort of criminals that flap about  on the backbenches of the current government ( after they've been slung out of the Cabinet but being naughty boys). Nixon was a special creature and his impeachment was far too late in coming.
The bravery of Graham and Bradley was a brilliant portrait of why newspapers should not be owned by greedy corporations, multimillionaires, and international tycoons. We know historically that so many outlets both in America and in this country have been run by tiny cliques who have used the press for their own purpose, be it supporting fascism of just making themselves filthy rich.
The right to publish was taken right up to the Supreme Court and in a major ruling that denied the executive the right to stop publication two things happened. The supreme justice reminded the court that freedom for the press was enshrined in the constitution and was the intention of the founding fathers to make sure that it would ever remain so. The second thing that the film showed was a furious Nixon in the White House instructing his flunkies that the Washington Post would not be allowed ever again in the White House not even to report his daughter Julie's wedding. His hatred of the Washington Post became a leaf motif of his presidency and to the jolly of all those watching the film the end sequence had a report from the police in Washington talking about a break-in in an office in central Washington.

I think Steven Spielberg has made an astonishing film but not a historical exercise, it could not be more topical than today just think we have a Republican president in the White House who has all the characteristics of Nixon, a man so thin-skinned and indeed so empty headed that every piece of news he doesn't like he describes as fake news, significantly he frequently singled out Washington Post and indeed the New York as  his biggest enemies. Marx said the history repeat itself versus tragedy and then as farce.Trouble is I don't think we are living through a farce however if you want to be positive and you see the glass as half full rather than half empty and you know that every ticket you buy to see'The Post' will annoy Trump mightily- go see it!