during the twentieth century differed sharply in their secondary
and more conspicuous characteristics to which the Guardian drew attention.
In denouncing "the dark, the false, and crooked doctrines" that would
bring devastation on "any man or people who believes in them", Shoghi
Effendi warned particularly against "the triple gods of Nationalism,
Racialism and Communism".(80)

Of Fascism's founding regime, created by the so-called "March on Rome" in
1922, little need be said. Long before it and its leader had been swept
into oblivion during the concluding months of the second world war,
Fascism had become an object of ridicule among the majority of even those
who had originally supported it. Its significance lies, rather, in the
host of imitators it spawned and which were to proliferate throughout the
world like some malignant series of mutations, in the decades since then.
Fuelled by a manic nationalism, this aberration of the human spirit
deified the state, discovered everywhere imaginary threats to the national
survival of whatever unhappy people it had fastened upon, and preached to
all who would listen the notion that war has an "ennobling" influence on
the human soul. The comic opera parade of uniforms, jackboots, banners and
trumpets usually associated with it should not conceal from a contemporary
observer the virulent legacy it has left in our own age, enshrining in
political vocabulary such anguished terms as _desaparecidos_ ("the
disappeared").

While sharing Fascism's idolatry of the state, its sister ideology Naziism
made itself the voice of a far more ancient and insidious perversion. At
its dark heart was an obsession with what its proponents called "race
purity". The single-minded determination with which it pursued its
murderous ends was in no way weakened by the demonstrably false postulates
upon which it was based. The Nazi system was unique in the sheer
bestiality of the act most commonly associated with its name, the
programme of genocide systematically carried out against populations
considered either valueless or harmful to humanity's future, a programme
that included a deliberate attempt literally to exterminate the entire
Jewish people. Ultimately, it was Naziism's determination that a "master
race" of its own conception must rule over the entire planet which was
principally responsible for fulfilling 'Abdu'l-Baha's prophetic warning of
twenty years earlier that another war, far more terrible t