of the modernity which was determined Occidentally at its commencement. Correspondingly, authoritarian “socialism” (in the variants of Fascism and National Socialism) is an analogous (not identical) form of the consummation of modernity.* Bolshevism and authoritarian socialism are metaphysically the same and are grounded in the supremacy of the beingness of beings (cf. the earlier Ponderings). The most proximate historical decision is: whether both basic forms of the consummation of modernity, independently of each other, entrench the abandonment of beings by being (i.e., the gigantism of technological- historiological-political arrangements and institutions) into unconditional results and thus in their gigantic style are the same, with or without explicit “political” union, or whether through them, in a mediated indirectness, a
*The term “socialism” designates only in appearance a socialism sympathetic to “people” in the sense of social solicitude; instead, it refers to the political-military-economic organization of the masses. Class: dominant stratum.
| reacquiring liberation of the Russians paves its way toward their history (not “race”) and an abyssal question-worthiness of the Germans paves its way toward theirs, whereby the history of both peoples stems from the same concealed ground of an inceptual destiny: to ground the truth of beyng (as event of appropriation).—
The gigantic danger is not the “Bolshevizing” of Europe—, for what is already a state of affairs, and is so in the essential sense of a necessary historical consummation, can never be a “danger”—. Danger prevails only where a complete passing over of the still concealed historical essence is imminent, in such a way that this threat is not, and indeed cannot, be recognized as such. The danger is that the inexorable consummation of modernity will assert itself as the sole ground of the advancement of “history.” The danger is the exclusiveness of the “results” of machination in the metaphysical sense—the unrecognizable and unsurmised subversion of every possibility of a completely other historical beginning which would announce itself as an overcoming of metaphysics (and consequently also of machination) and would necessarily have to recede far into the concealedness of what is not public. | The danger is that in a new way and unconditionally, out of the metaphysical destiny of Western history, “goals” would be set up and the unique decision (supremacy of beings or passageway toward beyng) would be thrust aside as unknowable and unworthy to be known, whereby the attained goals (of “culture,” of the “happiness of peoples,” of the assured “vital interests”) could in each case already as goals