Actually that doesn't match the original code. If the entire text of the original was one of the matches, then it should be squashed. Here is a one-liner that works and is shorter, but only because of what the strings are: 
perl -pi.bak -e 's/(blah|wah|yada)\1//g;s/^\s+$//' $file

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In reply to RE (tilly) 3: elementary hash by tilly
in thread elementary hash, STDIN questions by ybiC

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