A UFC fighter said she will not apologize for anti-communist remarks she made ahead of a fight against a Chinese competitor.
“If you’re confused about any of my opinions, you can watch the documentary, and you could get a good idea as to what my family had to go through, the reason I’m in the United States today, the reason that I do mixed martial arts, all of that stuff,” strawweight contender Rose Namajunas said on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show Wednesday, referring to sports documentary The Other Dream Team.
Namajunas’s family is originally from Lithuania and fled communism for the United States.
She watched the documentary, which focuses on the 1992 Lithuanian men’s national basketball team when they first competed as an independent nation in the Olympics following Soviet oppression, and used it as inspiration ahead of her fight against Zhang Weili later this month.
She had told a Lithuanian outlet that the documentary is a good reminder that “it’s better dead than red,” a common Cold War-era anti-communist message, and added that Zhang is “red” due to her being from communist China.
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