🔗 Share this article The Spanish Misguided View of Franco's Dictatorship: Remembering the Horrors On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week. The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence. His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere. "A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed. The Truth of Brutality and Suppression Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later. He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, 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 contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives. Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said. Starvation and Isolation However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery. Overconfidence and Political Revival Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule 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, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished 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 US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens 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 establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned. He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this. Return to Violence and Medieval Execution Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies. Fear and the Transition to Democracy However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … " The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy. Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy. And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, 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 problems outlined by MarÃa RamÃrez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern. Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.