Bøker av Christopher Booker

In Groupthink, his final book, the late, eminent journalist and bestselling author Christopher Booker seeks to identify the hidden key to understanding much that is disturbing about the world today.With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory, and to the writings of George Orwell from whose 'newspeak' the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable - and worrying - effects of 'groupthink', and its influence on our society. Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an 'in group'; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable. He shows how various interest groups, journalists and even governments in the twenty-first century have subscribed to this way of thinking, with deeply disturbing results. As Booker shows, such behaviour has led to a culture of fear, heralded by countless examples throughout history, from Revolutionary Russia to Napoleonic France and Hitler's Germany. In the present moment it has caused countless errors in judgement and the division of society into highly polarised, oppositional factions. From the behaviour of the controversial Rhodes Must Fall movement to the sacking of James Damore of Google, society's attitudes towards gender equality, the Iraq war and the 'European Dream', careers and lives have been lost as those in the 'in-group' police society with their new form of puritanism. As Booker argues, only by examining its underlying causes can we understand the sinister power of groupthink which permeates all aspects of our lives.

Christopher Booker''s classic story of the European Union''s "Great Deception," now updated with new material.Now published with a new preface explaining why The Great Deception is of the utmost importance today as it was when it was first published and to coincide with Great Britain''s EU referendum in 2016, this book suggests that the United States of Europe and its edict of ''ever closer union'' have been based on a colossal confidence trick.This book tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single ''supranational'' government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to the moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the ''crowning dream'' of the whole project. The book shows how the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to a ''slow motion coup d''etat'', based on a strategy of deliberate deception, into which Britain''s leaders, Macmillan and Heath, were consciously drawn. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher. The book chillingly shows how Britain''s politicians, not least Tony Blair, were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the ''project'' has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail.