The Spanish Misguided Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Remembering the Atrocities

Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed 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 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome 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 southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into 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 infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, 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 supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, 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 problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.