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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, 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 intentionally prolonged 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 "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious 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, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, 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 ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.