Documents are classified to suppress acknowledgment, not knowledge, of abuses.

Evidence

Not least they invite disclosure. Critique emerges in the interstices of what goes without saying and what should not be said: sometimes documents referred to those who parodied commonsense conventions. As we shall see, the “dirty secrets” of Sumatra’s planters were in classified missives not because the planters’ abuses of their laboring populations were not known, but precisely because they were not to be acknowledged and aired by an “inept” civil servant like Frans Carl Valck. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 169

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the stated reading purpose on colonial archival studies and epistemic anxieties.