There's an odd component of globalisation, which I find myself at a loss to explain. We are, we're assured, living in a global village, whose people are daily brought closer together. Yet we hear ever less about what is happening in distant parts of the world. There is less foreign news in the papers than there has been for 60 years.
Foreign documentaries are almost extinct.
Parliamentary debate about overseas issues has all but dried up. In the midst of the communications revolution, we are becoming strangers to each other. So the massacres due to begin tomorrow will take almost everyone by surprise. Indeed, there is hardly a news editor who has even heard of the land in which they are scheduled to take place. West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, which has been occupied since 1963 by Indonesia.