Ah, look, look! [sniffs violently] This whole question of the hammer and the sickleβmy God!βit is already a kind of ideological joke, eh? Because when we look at symbols, we think they are innocent little pictograms. But symbolsβthey are like those weird Slovenian pastries: they always hide something inside, something messy, something unexpected. [sniff]
And so let me proposeβof course, in a totally irresponsible, speculative wayβthat the hammer and sickle is not merely a workersβ emblem, no! It is like a dialectical offspring, a strange symbolic synthesis, between the Christian cross and the Islamic crescent-and-star.
You see, in early Christianityβespecially before it became this gigantic bureaucratic megachurchβthere is this radical concern for the poor, the oppressed. You have this idea that the first shall be last, that the beggar is closer to truth than the emperor. And what is this if not the proto-Marxist suspicion that the ruling class is full of, eh, ideological nonsense? [sniffs]
And then, Islamβlook, please, I say this with all respect and purely in symbolic termsβbrings this martial decisiveness, this warrior energy. Not in the Hollywood sense of violence and terrorism, but in the sense of the angel with the flaming sword, the insistence that faith is inseparable from action. It is a kind of ethical militancy: do something, engage, submit not to oppression but to the absolute.
So what happens when you combine these? [sniff] You get the hammer and sickle: the Christian concern for the poorβthe weak, the exploitedβjoined with the Islamic ethos of active struggle, of refusing to be passive. It is as if the cross and the crescent enter a Hegelian marriage: thesis, antithesis, and thenβboom!βthe proletarian symbol emerges as the bastard child.
And the beautyβeh, the obscenity!βis that Marxism tries to become a universal emancipatory project without the supernatural elements. It keeps the moral passion of early Christianity, the activist thrust of Islam, but throws out God like old cabbage from a Slovenian kitchen. [sniffs, gestures wildly]
So the hammer and sickle becomes this strange thing: a materialist Pentecost, a secular jihad, a revolution without heaven, formed from the leftovers of two great religious traditions, but now made edible for the modern worker.
And this, of course, is precisely why nobody wants to admit it! Because it reveals that even our most βatheistβ symbols are h
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