and even in their mere idea. Yet religious faith retains—already in virtue of the tradition preserved in it—the capacity to offer consolation, perspective, and refuge in general—and then remains, reckoned in terms of what preceded, once again a possession over and against nothingness. Yet the latter has become so null that it can precisely no longer be recognized in its essence.
111
The age of the consummation of modernity faces two possibilities: either violent and swift demise | (which looks like “catastrophe,” but in its already decided and distorted essence is too lowly to be such) or else deterioration of the current state of unconditional machination to infinity. Unavoidable in each case is obliviousness to the possibility of a history which includes a decision on the truth of beyng. Wars and revolutions, even if of gigantic proportions, remain superficial incidents. The presentation of these incidents in public becomes ever shallower, the horror ever more desolate, and the pain ever more solitary. Here perhaps a path takes its point of departure into something other; admittedly only perhaps—for first of all the most remote meditation must think out beyond demise and the notion of infinity and toward another beginning. Demise and infinity, within their machinational context and their domains of planning, can offer views that look like a “burgeoning” and a rejuvenation and that newly display all possibilities of the previous “heroism.” And yet—the entanglement in what was hitherto becomes only more insidious in such “young peoples,” because they burn behind themselves all the bridges on which an insight into the abandonment by being could tread.
112
“Bolshevism” and Russianism have something in common only because Russian socialism set in motion a first, though still clumsy, form of Bolshevism which was not yet in command of the essence of Bolshevism, and thereby took decisive “measures” in the metaphysical sense. These then underwent intensification and entrenchment, primarily in the form of a battle against Bolshevism. Yet this process of itself presses on toward a relentless and unscrupulous carrying out of the essential consummation of Bolshevism in its unconditional configuration. The occurrence of the shot in the back of the neck [Genickschuss] is only a coarse, superficial, and impotent sign of “terror.” The latter holds its genuine and essential power gathered in what