Ideology
Unlike the LEL, which stressed British identity and patriotism, the WDL was fairly open in its admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Seeking to distance itself from LEL conservatism and to build links with like-minded groups in continental Europe, the party's journals became notorious for their rabid racial hatred. By personal conviction Jordan's main belief was in anti-Semitism but, whilst the WDL did stress the Jews as an enemy "out-group", the League also emphasised anti-immigration rhetoric. However the WDL has been contrasted with the Union Movement, a contemporary group led by Oswald Mosley as, whilst the Union Movement had a coherent ideology that sought to remodel pre-Second World War fascism, the WDL was more crudely racist and had a much less developed political programme. Hans-Georg Betz has characterised the WDL as part of a tendency within British right-wing extremism to place a "recidivist or radical neo-fascism" as the ideological core rather than the populism of Scandanavian protest parties or the "hybrid appeal" that fuses elements of fascism to populism typified by the likes the Front National (italics are after Betz).
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Famous quotes containing the word ideology:
“We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation.... The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.”
—V.N. (Valintin Nikolaevic)
“There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)