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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances 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 making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.