mandate laid on him by the
Master. Equally clear and undeniable is the fact that both structure and
course represent the Will of God.

VIII

As Shoghi Effendi had prophetically warned, forces undermining inherited
systems and convictions of every kind were continuing to advance in tandem
with the integrating processes at work in the world. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the euphoria induced by the restoration of peace in both
Europe and the Orient proved to be of the briefest duration. Hardly had
hostilities ended than the ideological divisions between Marxism and
liberal democracy burst out into attempts to secure dominance between the
respective blocs of nations they inspired. The phenomenon of "Cold War",
in which the struggle for advantage stopped just short of military
conflict, emerged as the prevailing political paradigm of the next several
decades.

The threat posed by a new crisis in the international order was heightened
by breakthroughs in nuclear technology and the success of both blocs of
nations in equipping themselves with an ever-growing array of weapons of
mass destruction. The horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had
awakened humanity to the appalling possibility that a series of relatively
minor mishaps, as uncalculated as the process set in motion by the 1914
incident in Sarajevo, might this time lead to the annihilation of a
considerable portion of the world's population and leave large areas of
the globe uninhabitable. For Baha'is, the prospect could only bring
vividly to mind the sombre warning uttered by Baha'u'llah decades earlier:
"Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden
from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of
changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would
prove lethal."(108)

By far the greatest tragedy resulting from this latest contest for world
domination was the blight that it cast over the hopes with which formerly
subject peoples had welcomed the opportunity they believed they had been
given to build a new life of their own devising. The obstinate
determination of some of the surviving colonial powers to suppress such
hopes, though doomed to failure in the eyes of any objective observer, had
left the urge for liberation in many countries with no recourse but to
assume the character of revolutionary struggle. By 1960, such movements,
which had already been a feature of the po