The Spanish Overly Positive View of Franco's Dictatorship: Remembering the Atrocities

Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. 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 pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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 finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.