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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, 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 ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

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 southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar 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, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.