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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality 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 UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals 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 blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," 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. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards 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 lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part 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 rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.