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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

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

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel 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 forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed 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 dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation 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 drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable 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.