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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents 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 bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens 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 founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.