In 1994 the State Department of the USA was accused of deliberately ignoring genocide practised by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims because by recognizing it as such it would have increased pressure for American action. A number of officials of the State Department resigned in protest against USA policy on Bosnia.
The silence of the world's statesmen in the event of certain excesses on the part of one of their number is deafening and shaming. Examples include failure to protest: the excesses of Nazism and Stalinism, the massacres in Cambodia and Uganda, the appointment of a former Nazi to the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations, the USSR invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the crackdown on dissent in China, the USSR blockade of Lithuania; massacres in the Sudan by Islamic fundamentalists.
A third powerful factor in the diffusion of Communism is the conspiracy of silence on the part of a large section of the non-Catholic press of the world. We say conspiracy, because it is impossible otherwise to explain how a press usually so eager to exploit even the little daily incidents of life has been able to remain silent for so long about the horrors perpetrated in Russia, in Mexico and even in a great part of Spain; and that it should have relatively so little to say concerning a world organization as vast as Russian Communism. This silence is due in part to shortsighted political policy, and is favored by various occult forces which for a long time have been working for the overthrow of the Christian Social Order. (Papal Encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, 19 March 1937).