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Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.