đź”— Share this article The Spanish Misguided Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Remembering the Horrors On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently. The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence. Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere. "Some important part 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 – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled. The Reality of Violence and Oppression Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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. Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry. A Calculated, Brutal Conflict His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred 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 embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," 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. While traveling 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 World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery. Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation. Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief. State Terror and Historical Amnesia He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned. He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this. 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, torture, 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 tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies. Anxiety and Democratic Change However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 press, on the TV … " The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state. Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy. And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions 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, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties. The Peril of Unawareness While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by MarĂa RamĂrez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry. Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.