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:
“Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siècle. What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common.”
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