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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up 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, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow 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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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 printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.