Unholy Trinity The Parallel History of Three Dictators Napoleon Hitler and Stalin Ozias Marcovici

Despite appearances, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin have a few things in common. Each of them belonged to a minority from the country he tyrannized: Napoleon was Corsican (“I could recognize Corsica with closed eyes, only by her perfume”), Hitler was an Austrian born in the Habsburg Empire, and Stalin was Georgian. Historiography was generous with them, not to mention some sophisticated medical and psychiatric analyses. Yet it often went unnoticed that they suffered from the minority syndrome, characterized by the wish to act for the “good” of the greater majority (French, German, Russian). Thus, they imposed authoritarian regimes on their peoples, whom they attempted to endow with new territories, through violent expansionist politics. We can only wonder where mankind would be today had Napoleon only ruled over Corsica, Hitler in Austria, and Stalin in Georgia.