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At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, 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 death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters 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 possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, 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 emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. 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 major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.