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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded 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 famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, 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 western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king 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 vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.