The Position of Barcelona's Destino group and other regime sympathizers with regard to the Second World War: the example of Britain

Francos victory in 1939 abruptly dismantled the entire structure that had governed
Catalan thought and its journalism right through the decade. To consolidate its advance,
however, the regime also needed to fill the vacuum left by those thinkers who had
been sent into exile. They did this by launching new politico-intellectual publications
like the local Falanges weekly SolidaridadNacional, the unashamedly pro-Franco
broadsheet La Vanguardia Española and the Catalan catholic and nationalist paper Diario
de Barcelona. But these were soon overshadowed by a far more original and ambitious
publishing venture: Destino. Política de Unidad. A weekly magazine created in Burgos in
1937 by the Territorial Catalana de Falange (the Catalan cell of the Spanish Falange),
Destino was privatized and moved to Barcelona in 1939, eventually becoming the regimes
most effective political and cultural platform in Catalonia and the linchpin of a pro-
Franco movement which sought to promote anti-Catalan and anti-liberal sentiment, to
offer a final solution to the Catalan problem in the so-called new state, LanuevaEspaña,
and forge a new intellectual order.