"The ills from which the world now suffers will multiply"

Let us consider the First World War, which Shoghi Effendi has described in his writings as “the first stage in a titanic convulsion long predicted by Bahá’u’lláh.” Although it ended outwardly in a Treaty of Peace, ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá remarked: “Peace, Peace, the lips of potentates and peoples unceasingly proclaim, whereas the fire of unquenched hatreds still smolders in their hearts.” And then in 1920, He wrote: “The ills from which the world now suffers will multiply; the gloom which envelops it will deepen.” And again: “another war, fiercer than the last, will assuredly break out.” After this Second World War broke out in 1939, Shoghi Effendi called it a “tempest, unprecedented in its violence,” and the “great and mighty wind of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth.” After the termination of this War and the creation of the United Nations, the Guardian wrote in 1948, anticipating “still more violent convulsions” and referred to the “wings of yet another conflict” destined to “darken the international horizon.” And finally in his last Riḍván Message of April 1957, he left for posterity the following analysis of world conditions in the light of the prophecies and predictions recorded in the writings of the Faith:

Indeed, as we gaze in retrospect beyond the immediate past, and survey, in however cursory a manner, the vicissitudes afflicting an increasingly tormented society, and recall the strains and stresses to which the fabric of a dying Order has been increasingly subjected, we cannot but marvel at the sharp contrast presented, on the one hand, by the accumulated evidences of the orderly unfoldment, and the uninterrupted multiplication of the agencies, of an Administrative Order designed to be the harbinger of a world civilization, and, on the other, by the ominous manifestations of acute political conflict, of social unrest, of racial animosity, of class antagonism, of immorality and of irreligion, proclaiming, in no uncertain terms, the corruption and obsolescence of the institutions of a bankrupt Order.

https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/the-universal-house-of-justice/messages/19760707_001/1#809149464