For some reason this reminded of a brilliant excerpt from Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting":
"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assasination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten." (p.7)