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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year 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 Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. 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

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method 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 employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.