Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Absolutely none of them are going to realise that this condemns every insurrection, every revolution, that leds to a civil war, to the execution of the losers. Mao, Castro, Lenin, they all fail this test, no?
A revanchist Catholic conservatism doesn’t appeal to me either but it does seem pretty weak tea as compared to varied of those communist revolutions, no?