Anders Behring Breivik's Raised Fist -- The Varied Meanings Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Muslim militant who admitted to killing 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree last year, began his first day of trial on Monday with a disturbing, rod-straight salute of the arm, his fist closed tightly. His courtroom theatrics continued, as The Lede reported, when he wept during a viewing of his own video manifesto. Mr. Breivik tried to make a similar sign during a February detention hearing as he entered the courtroom. At the time, his hands were cuffed together and the salute, executed quickly as court guards moved him to his seat, did not have the same resonance and garnered less notice. His lawyer, Geir Lippestad, described it as a type of right-wing greeting, according to a rough translation of a report in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet. Mr. Breivik, in his sprawling, hate-filled manifesto, defined what he believed to be the symbolism of his salute and sought to distance it from the more familiar, open-palmed fascist salute used by Adolf Hitler. The military salutation of the PCCTS, Knights Templar is the clenched fist salute. The raised fist salute consists of raising the right arm with a clenched fist (preferably with a white glove). The clenched fist symbolizes strength, honour and defiance against the Marxist tyrants of Europe while the white glove symbolizes purity, duty, kinship and martyrdom. Using the right arm symbolizes the tradition of the "Right Opposition." The salutation is in line with traditional usage, as we regard the present ruling multiculturalist elites in Western Europe as left wing fascists. Our military salutation has nothing to do with the so called "white power" salutation or the "Roman Salute" (Saluto Romano), where the palm is faced down with fingers touching, often known as the Hitler Salute used by National Socialists. Despite that assertion, the raised fist salute has long been a powerful but mercurial symbol, having been claimed by Spanish anti-Fascists in the 1930s, American civil rights activists in the 1960s - famously by black medalists at the 1968 Olympic Games - and, more recently, by white nationalists in Europe. It is a symbol of hatred associated with white supremacists and Aryan groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League, but has also thrust into the air as a sign of defiance by those who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Some on Europe's leftist fringe have intended for it to mean the "red salute," according to the British Communist site Proletarian Online. Beyond the gesture itself, the image of a raised fist has been more commonly associated with justice and solidarity movements on the political left. Last year, it was adopted by some Wisconsin protesters who opposed an effort to roll back union bargaining rights. An article on the Web site of AIGA, a professional design association, traces the origin of the image to 19th-century revolutions in France and lists several more examples of its appropriation by politicians: Today the Socialist Worker's Party still uses a fist, although the Mitterand Socialists in France, which like most western socialist parties renounced nationalization of industry, turned the fist into a graphic holding a rose. But Slobodan Milosevic liked a red fist of socialist power, which was parodied and challenged by Otpor, a student resistance group, in the 1990s. The Otpor group ("Resistance") used a black fist as their symbol. It was not clear where Mr. Breivik developed his idea that the clenched gesture had a connection to the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order whose banner he claims to carry. While Mr. Breivik has said in his manifesto that he held at least one meeting in London 2002 with fewer than a dozen other people who shared in his desire to reconstitute the Knights Templar, Norwegian prosecutors said on Monday that no such group existed.