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Nick Cohen
Sunday 26th September 2010
Blair turns the mainstream to the extremist fringe
I've a review in the Australian of Tony Blair's autobiography. I look at how mainstream British society is now going along with conspiracy theories from the far left and far right so thoroughly that it is hard to tell them apart.
To have believers in the one-party Marxist state, the one-religion Islamist caliphate and the one-race ethnically cleansed nation as your enemies is a badge of honour any politician should be proud to wear. Unfortunately for Blair, his enemies are not confined to the thuggish fringe. The mainstream repeats the conspiracy theories of the fascists and the Trotskyists so faithfully it is hard to tell who is following whom; whether the extremists’ ideas have taken over the mainstream or whether the extreme is an exaggerated image of the furies of the liberal centre, like a disfigured reflection in a fairground mirror. With the left and right-wing newspapers, as with the far-left and far-right parties, differences between supposed political opposites have broken down.Read the whole thing
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About Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (Fourth Estate) and What's Left? How The Left Lost Its Way (Harper Perennial). Living With Lies, a collection of his writing for Standpoint, is available as an ebook.
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