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At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. 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 population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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. "This was the narrative 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 centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators 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 dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.