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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition 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 newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people 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 need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. 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 strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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 regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.