To highlight the intention the fumes do not touch the region of Nakhichevan but cover the region of Syunik in Armenia, which Turkish and Azerbaijani expansionist rhetoric has claimed as part of Azerbaijan. This type of imagery has links to genocidal rhetoric throughout history, including during the Nazi regime in Germany. The Calvert Journal recently reported on the anti-Armenian postage stamp issued by Azerbaijan after the November 2020 ceasefire that juxtaposed a solider with someone exterminating or fumigating the region of Artsakh. This family, the Aliyevs, have ruled Azerbaijan in some manner for 50 years. In the WikiLeaks dump of secret US documents, the US state department goes to great lengths to describe Azerbaijan’s government as a criminal organization that most resembles a medieval feudal fiefdom or the gangster Corleone family from the film The Godfather. Any artist or cultural group that receives patronage or money from Azerbaijan is complicit with war crimes, oppression, and ethnic cleansing. To preserve endangered and invaluable artifacts, the art world needs to stop normalizing Azerbaijan’s monstrous behavior and start accepting responsibility for platforming despots. This is especially important to call attention to now, since Azerbaijan is actively engaged in ethnically cleansing an Indigenous community and destroying millennia-old monuments, permanently robbing the world of a rich cultural record. In the last decade, scores of artists and institutions have taken money from the brutal dictatorship of Azerbaijan to artwash its reputation.
Since at least 2011, Azerbaijan has used artists and art institutions for propaganda purposes to a degree that is unequaled in the contemporary era.