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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "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 triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief 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", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter 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 European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.