Planters’ reports entwined truth with deliberate falsehoods

Evidence

Valck charges the planters with more than brutality. He accuses them of participation in a conspiracy of silence, deceit, and terror in which their reports “contain some truth but more often are filled with unashamed lies.” His accusations are not only aimed at subordinate European “no goods,” as he puts it. They are aimed higher and more dangerously at what he derisively calls the “gentlemen” (with their “blood-stained hands”) of the most established plantation companies. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1056

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the secrecy/complicity dynamics in the diamond-bourse extralegal literature — closed groups policing their own reputational transcripts. — connects to: Disclosed company falsehoods destroyed the incinerator project’s credibility