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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer 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 authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: 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 elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to 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 United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards 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 founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine 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 historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum 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 outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.