han the first,
would ravage the world. Like Fascism, Naziism has left a detritus in our
own time. In its case, this takes the form of a language and symbols
through which fringe elements in present-day society, demoralized by the
economic and social decay around them and made desperate by the absence of
solutions, vent their impotent rage on minorities whom they blame for
their disappointments.

The false god that the Master was moved to identify explicitly, and the
one denounced by name by Shoghi Effendi, had demonstrated its character at
its outset by brutally destroying, during the latter part of World War I,
the first democratic government ever established in Russia. For long
years, the Soviet system created by Vladimir Lenin succeeded in
representing itself to many as a benefactor of humankind and the champion
of social justice. In the light of historical events, such pretensions
were grotesque. The documentation now available provides irrefutable
evidence of crimes so enormous and follies so abysmal as to have no
parallel in the six thousand years of recorded history. To a degree never
before imagined, let alone attempted, the Leninist conspiracy against
human nature also sought systematically to extinguish faith in God.
Whatever view of the situation political theorists may currently hold, no
one can be surprised that such deliberate violence to the roots of human
motivation led inexorably to the economic and political ruin of those
societies luckless enough to fall under Soviet sway. Its longer-term
spiritual effect, tragically, was to pervert to the service of its own
amoral agenda the legitimate yearnings for freedom and justice of subject
peoples throughout the world.

From a Baha'i point of view, humanity's worship of idols of its own
invention is of importance not because of the historical events associated
with these forces, however horrifying, but because of the lesson it
taught. Looking back on the twilight world in which such diabolical forces
loomed over humanity's future, one must ask what was the weakness in human
nature that rendered it vulnerable to such influences. To have seen in
someone like Benito Mussolini the figure of a "Man of Destiny", to have
felt obliged to understand the racial theories of Adolf Hitler as anything
other than the self-evident products of a diseased mind, to have seriously
entertained the reinterpretation of human experience through dogmas that
had given birth to the Sov