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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years 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 extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, 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 disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, 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 dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father 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 publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.