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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

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

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of 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 made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts 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.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.