I understand that the fist salute has a long Socialist and Communist history? Sorry though, reminds me of the People's Front of Judea's fist-to-the-head salute (painful!) in Monty Python's Life of Brian film.
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i really don't know anything about salutes, as i salute to no one. but i assume in this context that it has to do with brotherhood, parity, in ideology anyway.
The clenched fist was first used by the communists in the Spanish civil war, as a counterpoint to the open-palmed Roman salute adopted by the fascists. The clenched fist symbolises strength and unity - fingers which are individually fragile can together make a powerful fist. It became a symbol of communism and was co-opted to many revolutionary causes, most potently the civil rights struggle in the US and opposition to colonialism in the third world. But it is now so freighted with historical associations - the murky faction fighting on the left in the Spanish civil war, the perversion of communism in the Soviet Union, the tyrannies that emerged in post-colonial Africa - that, according to the socialist historian Sheila Rowbotham, it has become a double-edged symbol. "Even in the 1960s," she says, "my generation used it slightly self-consciously. It was connected to communism and post-'56, [when the Soviet army suppressed the Hungarian uprising] using it made you feel slightly uneasy."
From: http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes2006/story/0,,1785671,00.html
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