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-Bahá had warned, be deployed and refined during the course of the coming conflict.