Official acknowledgment of selected crimes can obscure a regime’s total criminality.

Evidence

It was precisely by conceding some crimes that Khrushchev concealed the criminality of the regime as a whole, and it is precisely against this camouflage and the hypocrisy of the present Russian rulers—all of them trained and promoted under Stalin—that the younger generation of Russian intellectuals is now in an almost open rebellion. For they know everything there is to know about “mass purges, and the deportation and annihilation of entire peoples.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 43

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the mechanism by which partial official truth-telling functions as camouflage for system-wide atrocity.
• XREF: connects to: Statistics about atrocities obscure the essence that extreme cases reveal. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 92