Several watchdog organizations... are accusing Azerbaijan of committing genocide against the 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. Historically known as Artsakh, this ancient Armenian region was brought under Azerbaijani rule in 2020.

Modern day hostilities between Armenia, an ancient nation and the first to adopt Christianity, and Azerbaijan, a Muslim nation that was created in 1918, began in September 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a war to capture Artsakh....

Once the September 2020 war began, Turkey quickly joined its Azerbaijani co-religionists against Armenia, even though the dispute did not concern it.

These Muslim groups committed massive atrocities. One included raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging out her eyes, and sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts.

The war ended in November 2020, with Azerbaijan gaining control of a significant portion of Artsakh.

"In the extreme southeastern part of Europe, known as the Caucasus, a silent genocide is looming. The Lachin Corridor that connects Armenia to Artsakh, the region in Azerbaijan where mainly Christian Armenians live, has been closed by the government for eight months. Supermarket shelves are empty; there is hardly any food, fuel, or medicine for the 120,000 Armenian Christians who live there, including 30,000 children and 20,000 seniors... a convoy of food and medicine has been standing in front of the border since July 25 [a month], but the International Red Cross is not allowed access to the inhabitants of Artsakh. According to journalists living in the area, most residents only get one meal a day. People in Artsakh queue for hours at night for bread, waiting for their daily rations. At the same time, sources within Artsakh report shooting at Armenians trying to harvest the land... in all probability bread will also soon be unavailable due to the shortage of fuel... Bakers can no longer heat their ovens." — Sonja Dahlmans, Dutch journalist, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

"There is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians...[A] blockade... by the Azerbaijani security forces impeding access to any food, medical supplies, and other essentials should be considered a Genocide under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention: 'Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.'....Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks." — Luis Moreno Ocampo, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, August 7, 2023.

Muslim regimes regularly make life intolerable for Christian minorities, apparently to force them to abandon their properties and leave.

A few weeks ago, the president of Iraq revoked a decade-old decree that granted Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako powers over Christian endowment affairs. "This is a political maneuver to seize the remainder of what Christians have left in Iraq and Baghdad and to expel them." — Diya Butrus Slewa, human rights activist from Ainkawa, aina.org, July 13, 2023.

Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback referred to the blockade as the latest attempt at "religious cleansing" of Christian Armenia... in his testimony, [he] said that this latest genocide is being "perpetrated with U.S.-supplied weaponry and backed by Turkey, a member of NATO." If the U.S. does not act, "we will see again another ancient Christian population forced out of its homeland." — catholicnewsagency.com, June 21, 2023.

Not only has U.S. diplomacy been ineffective for the besieged Armenians; it has actually exacerbated matters by allowing the aggressors to continue their atrocities.

"[T]he only thing the Washington-backed talks appear to have produced is the emboldenment of Azerbaijan's aggression.... For over eight months, the region's 120,000 Indigenous Armenians...have been deprived access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity, and water in what is nothing less than genocide by attrition.... When Washington-based talks resumed in June, Azerbaijan began shelling the region. In the months since, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to Karabakh—and later reported that an Armenian patient in its care had been abducted by Azerbaijani forces en route to Armenia for treatment. This is the predictable consequence of Washington's insistence on negotiations amid Azerbaijan's blockade of Artsakh and occupation of Armenian territory. It has signaled to Baku that its strategy of coercive diplomacy is working, disincentivizing de-escalation..." — Alex Galitsky and Gev Iskajyan, Armenian National Committee of America; Armenian National Committee of Artsakh, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

Indeed, part of the façade of diplomacy is that Azerbaijan insists that the Christian Armenians of Artsakh are being treated no differently than Muslim Azerbaijanis—since all are citizens of Azerbaijan.

Clearly, negotiating simply bought the Azerbaijanis more time in which to starve the Armenians, and possibly another way for the United States to pretend it was "doing something" without actually doing anything --apart from allowing more savagery.

The results are clear: nearly every Armenian who fell into Azerbaijani captivity after the 2020 war has been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, decapitated or murdered. None of these acts has ever been punished. To the contrary, those who kill Armenians receive medals and are glorified in Azerbaijan.

"The Western press rarely writes about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Most reactions follow the line that it is not a religious conflict, but a claim by two countries over a disputed territory. Given the many examples that exist in which precisely religious buildings, tombs and inscriptions are systematically destroyed, it is difficult to maintain that this is the case." — Sonja Dahlmans, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

"Azerbaijan was able to impose this blockade because Russian peacekeepers allow them to do so.... Although Russia is often portrayed as Armenia's patron, the reality is more complicated. Russia's largest oil company owns a 19.99% share of Azerbaijan's largest natural gas field." — Associated Press, August 9, 2023.

Marseille, France's second-largest city and biggest port, is depicted as a European version of Chicago in the Prohibition times with gang warfare, shootings, protest strikes by police and tension among "communities" routine features of daily life.

The usually tame French media describe the situation as a "challenge to law and order"... President Emmanuel Macron goes further by warning about a "loss of authority" that he intends to correct by as yet unknown measures.

Loss of authority isn't limited to Marseille gangs engaged in war over a bigger share of the drug market... Authority is also under constant challenge in Paris itself, where one could see numerous shop windows shattered by protesters in the recent riots against a two-year increase in the legal minimum retirement age. Even once sleepy cities such as Nîmes and Limoges have been affected by "loss of authority".

However, Macron's first moves and the ideas his entourage are circulating look more like dancing around the issue rather than addressing its root causes.

Where does authority come from?

The classical answer is that it comes from the two key tools of persuasion and coercion that a properly constituted government has for imposing its decisions. Beyond that, however, one may argue that authority emanates from continuity of rules and mores, the accumulation of a cultural, including religious, heritage that transcends here-and-now considerations.

Macron tries to address that problem by talking of "duties" as opposed to "rights", something that contradicts the core values of the French Revolution. In the French Revolution's worldview, citizens, regardless of whether they do their duties or not, have inalienable rights. In Macron's redefinition, a citizen's rights may look like rewards for duties performed.

But who sets those rights and duties?

Can one talk of duties in the service of an autocratic regime that one hasn't chosen?

That could lead to an odd situation in which you may be in office but not in power or, even if you manage to simulate being in power, you are not in authority. In the latter case, coercion may appear as a substitute for authority, hence the widening and increasingly violent use of police to "restore law and order".

Political correctness and the cult of the victim complicate the matter further.

Every system is corrupted by exaggerating its core value which, in this context, means that too much democracy corrupts the democratic system in which the pendulum moves either towards authoritarianism or governability.

In most western democracies today, the pendulum is moving dangerously close to ungovernability often in the form of governments posturing to govern on a day-by-day basis. The challenge for Macron and others is to gingerly nudge the pendulum in the opposite direction. But don't hold your breath.