đź”— Share this article The Spanish Overly Positive View of Franco's Dictatorship: Remembering the Atrocities On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week. The Warning of Outward Mediocrity Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence. Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air. "Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed. The Reality of Violence and Oppression Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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 people later. He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry. A Calculated, Brutal Conflict His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers. After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky 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 famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering. Overconfidence and Political Revival Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him. As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief. Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel 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 onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned. He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this. Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974. Anxiety and Democratic Change Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 press, on the television … " The main feeling in response to Franco's demise 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 a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state. Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy. And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties. The Peril of Unawareness While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by MarĂa RamĂrez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern. Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.