đź”— Share this article Spain's Misguided Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Horrors On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently. The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence. His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air. "A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people 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 executed 20,000 individuals afterwards. Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry. A Calculated, Brutal Conflict His war was deliberately slow 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 supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers. After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said. Famine and Pariah Status However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering. Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him. Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. 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 southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped. 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 never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited. Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him. Return to Violence and Medieval Execution Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974. Anxiety and Democratic Change Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning 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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … " The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state. Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy. And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties. The Danger of Ignorance During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by MarĂa RamĂrez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry. Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.