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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
After the outrage on many an MMA website and forum over the past week for Joe Brammer's Hoelzer Reich sponsorship getting full airtime on Saturday's Ultimate Fighter finale, Zuffa, the parent company of the UFC and WEC, has banned the sponsor from future events. WEC General Manager Reed Harris broke the news to Maggie Hendricks at Yahoo! Sports that the plug had been pulled on the sponsor.
Fan outrage over the company reached a fever pitch in the last week due to the company's use of Nazi-associated imagery in their clothing, including the totenkopf skull, SS styled logos and collar ranks and much, much more, including a phrase in German on one of their shirts that translates to "The Fourth Reich has begun."
There are those that don't seem to get why there's been an uproar on the images that have been used by this company, including the following comment from one of the company's owners, Jamie Vine,"The imagery that we reference dates back hundreds of years before Nazi Germany, and we did not realize that the brief association some of the imagery had with Nazi Germany over 70 years ago would still be so sensitive to so many people."
This is the argument that has been touted by people not understanding the issue, that these images all date back before Nazi Germany. While that is true, their use in conjunction with one another invokes a very specific time period, and no matter how brief that association may have been with Nazi Germany, they will forever be linked. The fact that some of their designs so closely resemble those neo-Nazi and so-called "white power" organizations cannot be ignored. They can claim whatever they want about using images that have been around for hundreds of years, and none of them by themselves bear any Nazism or racism, but in using many of them together in very intentional ways is something they can't argue against.
They will never come straight out and state their support of any neo-Nazi movement or group outright, but as BloodyElbow.com's Brent Brookhouse has chronicled excellently, they haven't taken their chance to denounce that ideology either to distance themselves entirely. Again, while they have discontinued some of these designs, the fact remains they created them in the first place and their association with one of the darkest periods in human history cannot be ignored, no matter the arguments they attempt to make claiming their innocence in this matter.
The UFC made a mistake in allowing this particular company air time on Saturday, as even if Brammer's shirt in and of itself wasn't an offensively designed piece, which it was not, what the company has represented and to date has not denounced is not something that should receive any support from the UFC, MMA fans or right minded peoples in general. Zuffa is making the right move to distance themselves from this company and the continued bad publicity that would come along with continuing to allow their name to be shown on UFC and WEC broadcasts.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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