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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US 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 arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "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 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, 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 oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, 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 produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. 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 end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.