Totalitarianism thrives on deliberate ambiguity and the installation of perpetual fear in the mind of its subjected citizenry. Even after emigrating to Great Britain, the great Hungarian-Russian historian Tibor Szamuely could never get to bed at night because he never knew when that knock at the door by Stalin’s secret police might come. For those still living in closed societies, prison or execution is simply a question of when – and that’s a question that totalitarians love to toy with.
Consider the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, who was sentenced to death in Iran for two separate crimes – murder and adultery. Like Nabokov’s Cincinnatus C., she’s never been told with any certitude the exact time of her demise, although a false rumor by a well-meaning human rights group made it seem as if it were yesterday.
