Spain's Overly Positive View of Franco's Regime: Remembering the Atrocities

At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield 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

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "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 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador 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. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned 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 invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

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 security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.