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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect 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 last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.