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Daniel Ammons

@danielammons.bsky.social
49 followers 98 following 168 posts

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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
A screenshot of a MENA Visuals post reading "A surreal monument in Baghdad, Iraq featuring a five-armed giant struggling to hold up a massive, toppling ancient cynlinder seal" with a photo of same. The RT reads "How it feels being the one scribe keeping the whole ziggurat afloat"
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Just looked up a photo of the resplendent quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala. Now that's a bird that looks like he's going through it.
A wonderfully multicolored resplendent quetzal whose feathers on its head are mussed to create a haggard impression
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Gabon/Benin mixup 😩
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
Pick a lane!
Wikipedia screenshot describing cougars as a "large small cat"
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Some of those exiles pictured here in 1959. Unusually both these Tibetan exiles and the Kuomintang in Taiwan used a raised fist salute that had reached China via the CCP about 25 years prior. It had become less specifically ideological by this point but the PRC still used it as well.
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
There's lots more to share, but I'll close out with this. This is the only time in the early 20th century that I could find where a fascist movement adopts a raised fist as their salute. The Acción Revolucionaria Mexicanista called it the "Aztec salute", and it doesn't appear to have lasted.
A 1934 newspaper depicting a Mexican "Gold Shirt", possibly their leader Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco, giving a raised fist "Aztec salute". The reference to the Aztecs is as historically bankrupt as Nazi references to Germanic paganism.
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Although the raised fist spread through Communist parties in the early days and retained a close association with communism (or at least radical socialism) through at least the 1960s, the Soviet Union never used it much except in illustrations of foreign struggle, such as this one.
A 1931 illustration showing a capitalist (supported by a king, a priest, a social democrat, and a policeman) confronting a worker with a raised fist badge. That badge is the emblem of the Rotfront, the paramilitary wing of the German Communist Party. The social democrat is labelled with the letters SR (in Cyrillic), which after translation matches the German SPD. Helpfully the Russian SRs, one of the allies and later opponents of the Bolsheviks, use different Cyrillic letters in their acronym, which helps to place this conflict in Germany rather than the USSR.
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
That design concept stuck around, even after the fist had been more formalized as a salute and symbol. Here are two more examples, from 1930 (left) and 1948 (right), but it's been used to this day.
The cover of a 1930 Yiddish songbook published by a Communist newspaper in New York City. It shows a fist rising out of a crowd, and is titled "We Want the World". This might be a reference to Irish revolutionary James Connolly's 1907 poem "We Only Want the Earth", also published in a songbook.A small section of the cover of a May 1948 issue of the newspaper El Popular, published by Taller de Gráfica Popular, a radical print shop in Mexico City. Unfortunately the versions available online of this cover do not show the full cover, which depicts the crowd of flag-bearing workers and peasants from which the fist rises. You can see it in the archives at UC-Berkeley, but if you want to take a photo (as I did) you have to agree not to distribute it without paying quite a lot of money.
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Most sources credit the image on the right, by Ralph Chaplin in a 1917 edition of Solidarity (the newspaper of the Industrial Workers of the World) as the progenitor. I'd disagree in a couple ways, but I think the more interesting thing is this very similar image 5 years earlier by Mihaly Biro.
1912 poster by Mihaly Biro in Austria Hungary, depicting a huge red fist rising from a crowd of workers spilling out of a factory towards the parliament. The Hungarian text urges workers to support a suffrage rally held by the Social Democratic party."The Hand That Will Rule the World - One Big Union" by Ralph Chaplin, 1917. The cartoon depicts a huge fist rising from a mass of workers and peasants with factories in the background.
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Finished (at least the first version) of my presentation on the history of the raised fist as symbol and salute. Thought I'd share a few of the most interesting images I found.
The memorial on the University of Washington campus to the volunteers of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, decorated with a large raised fist.
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
The first time I ever played Tetris was on this beast. I remember thinking "Wow, what a good idea to include a typewriter in your computer, at home those are two different things!"
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 11/10/2024
Two deliveries so far to the IAM kitchens serving the Boeing picket line. Having friends who have a farm is cool.
A spread of chocolate chip cookies, parsley, chard, corn, squash, and shiso in the commercial kitchen at the IAM hall in SeattleA spread of tomatoes, green beans, carrots, celery, squash, shiso, and groundcherries in the commercial kitchen at the IAM hall in Seattle with a smiling dipshit behind them
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 18/09/2024
oh
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 10/02/2024
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Daniel Ammons @danielammons.bsky.social · 28/05/2023
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