đź”— Share this article The Spanish Misguided View of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Atrocities At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently. The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem. His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air. "Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled. The Reality of Brutality and Suppression Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later. 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, 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 strange obsession, Freemasonry. A Deliberately Slow and Violent War His war 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 "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers. Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said. Famine and Pariah Status But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of JaĂ©n and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering. Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, 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 United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped. Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned. He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him. Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies. Anxiety and Democratic Change However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … " The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy. Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy. 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 insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s. The Danger of Ignorance During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by MarĂa RamĂrez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern. Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.