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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. 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 prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.