by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the next episode of The Dictator’s Playbook, one I was particularly interested because the
“dictator of the week” (as Charles inevitably joked) was Francisco Franco, the Generalísimo who ruled Spain with an iron hand from 1939, when
his Nationalist forces won the Spanish Civil War, to 1975, when he died. Of the
six dictators profiled on The Dictator’s Playbook — Mussolini, Franco, Kim Il Sung, Manuel Noriega,
Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin — Franco and Kim Il Sung were the only ones who
held power uninterruptedly until their deaths, and Franco lingered so long on
his deathbed that the original cast of Saturday Night Live did screamingly funny mock newscasts announcing that
“Generalissimo Francisco Franco is carrying on his valiant struggle to remain
dead.” The Franco episode of The Dictator’s Playbook was fascinating in two aspects: first, it showcased
his unusual background — he served most of his pre-power military stint in
Spain’s remaining colonies, mostly Morocco — and second, it was a necessary
corrective to the later image (shaped by Cold War Western propaganda that
regarded Franco’s Spain as an important bulwark against Communism in Western
Europe) of Franco as a “soft” dictator, repressive but not particularly
bloodthirsty. The first point first: Franco was the third son of a father who
was a sixth-generation officer in the Spanish navy, and Franco’s ambition
growing up was to be in the navy, too — until, when Franco was six, Spain got
its ass kicked by the U.S. in the Spanish-American War of 1898-1900. The
Spanish navy shrank to insignificance and the last vestiges of Spain’s imperial
domains outside of North Africa and the Canary Islands — Cuba, Puerto Rico and
the Philippines — passed to American dominance. Because Spain virtually had no
navy left, Franco joined the army — and got posted to Morocco largely because
it would be quicker and easier to be promoted there. When the Moroccans mounted
a rebellion in 1912, Franco was key to the repression; leading a force called
the “Army of Africa” —who were actually native Moroccans fighting, like the Gurkhas in India, for the imperialist power against their
countrymen — he ordered mass murders of any Moroccans who were associated, however
tenuously, with the rebellion. His idea was to kill enough potential dissenters
as to frighten the rest of the population into silence and acquiescence.
Franco’s rise to power began in 1931, when grass-roots protests against the
Spanish monarchy in general and the reigning monarch, Alfonso XIII, in
particular, led to the king’s abdication and Spain becoming a republic.
Left-wing candidates won Spain’s first free elections in 1931 and Franco was
exiled to a command post on the Canary Islands — the new government having
concluded that the way to neutralize the potential of a Right-wing coup was to exile the officers as far away from Spain as
possible. Spain’s politics continued to be volatile as the Leftists lost power
to a Right-wing coalition in the 1933 elections, only to regain it in 1936
after the various Left-wing parties came together to form an alliance called
the Popular Front. By this time Franco was back in Morocco and he became part
of a coalition of Right-wing officers anxious to get back to Spain, overthrow
the republican government and take over — but they still had the problem of
moving their forces from Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain
itself. Franco solved that problem by calling Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini
and enlisting their support in his Right-wing coup; Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy provided the planes Franco used to fly his forces over the Straits of
Gibraltar and land them in Spain. Once on the ground, Franco used the same
wide-open terror tactics he’d pioneered in Morocco, including mass executions
not only of regime opponents but also their families and anyone who might someday be a threat. He also protected the Roman
Catholic Church against attacks by anarchists who regarded the church (rightly)
as a key element in Spain’s repressive Right-wing culture and targeted it,
looting the churches and killing priests.
What Franco thought would be an easy
victory turned into a three-year civil war when the Soviet Union came to the
aid of the republican government (or at least the Communist elements in it —
the Popular Front was an unstable coalition of Communists, anarchists and
something called the POUM, independent Leftists whom the Communists denounced
as Trotskyists), only to withdraw their support in February 1939 and allow
Franco and his forces to take the final redoubt of the republican government,
Madrid. Most of the show dealt with the civil war and it only touched on
Franco’s rule after that, though it did mention how thoroughly he took over all the instruments of
communication, including the educational system as well as the media, in an
attempt to make sure that not only Leftists themselves but Left-wing ideals
were stamped out of Spain forever. In that he failed; unlike a surprising
number of dictators, Franco actually arranged an exit strategy aimed at
preserving his regime after he died — only his strategy, which was to restore
the monarchy in the person of young Prince Juan Carlos, backfired: once in
power Juan Carlos decided to restore democracy and turn Spain into a
British-style constitutional monarchy governed by a popularly elected
legislature. The Dictator’s Playbook
episode on Franco was quite good even though they only touched on Spain’s
neutrality during World War II — Franco wisely kept Spain out of the conflict
so he could continue in power no matter which side won, and Joseph Goebbels’
diaries are full of imprecations against Franco that he wasn’t joining the Axis
“after all we did for him!”
