🔗 Share this article Spain's Misguided Perception of Franco's Regime: Revisiting the Atrocities On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently. The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. 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 extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air. "Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled. The Truth of Violence and Oppression Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later. Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies. A Deliberately Slow and Violent War 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. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred 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. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said. Starvation and Isolation But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering. Overconfidence and Political Revival 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him. As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts 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 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 central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts 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. Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him. Return to Violence and Medieval Execution When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies. Anxiety and Democratic Change However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … " The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy. Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. 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 here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties. The Danger of Ignorance During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by MarÃa RamÃrez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry. Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.