ncoherent anarchism at one extreme to sharply
honed racist and nationalist obsessions at the other, these underground
forces shared one naive conviction: if the particular part of the
prevailing order that had become their target could somehow be brought
down, the inherent nobility of the segment of humankind that supported
their aims--or the assumed nobility of humankind in general--would by itself
ensure a new era of freedom and justice.

Alone among these would-be agents of violent change one broadly based
movement was proceeding systematically and with ruthless clarity of
purpose towards the goal of world revolution. The Communist Party,
deriving both its intellectual thrust and an unshakeable confidence in its
ultimate triumph from the writings of the nineteenth century ideologue
Karl Marx, had succeeded in establishing groups of committed supporters
throughout Europe and various other countries. Convinced that the genius
of its master had demonstrated beyond question the essentially material
nature of the forces that had given rise to both human consciousness and
social organization, the Communist movement dismissed the validity of both
religion and "bourgeois" moral standards. In its view, faith in God was a
neurotic weakness indulged in by the human race, a weakness that had
merely permitted successive ruling classes to manipulate superstition as
an instrument for enslaving the masses.

To the leaders of the world, blindly edging their way towards the
universal conflagration which pride and folly had prepared, the great
strides being made by science and technology represented chiefly a means
of gaining military advantage over their rivals. The European opponents of
the nations concerned, however, were not the poverty-stricken and largely
uneducated colonial populations whom they had been able to subject. The
false confidence that military hardware thus inspired led inexorably to a
race to equip armies and navies with the most advanced of modern weaponry,
and to do so on as massive a scale as possible. Machine guns, long-range
cannon, "dreadnoughts", submarines, landmines, poison gas and the
possibility of equipping airplanes for bombing attacks emerged as features
of what one commentator has termed the "technology of death".(35) All of
these instruments of annihilation would, as 'Abdu'l-Baha had warned, be
deployed and refined during the course of the coming conflict.

Science and technology were also exerting