Coming to Grips with the True History of Taekwondo
A Killing Art, Alex Gillis, 2008 Introduction When I read Alex Gillis' breakthrough work A Killing Art in 2016, I was surprised, like most anyone who had practiced Taekwondo for any period of time. My own experience was brief, less than a year in the 1990s while attending Air Force intelligence officer school in San Angelo, Texas. As part of an International Taekwondo Federation (ITF) school, I had heard the standard story that General Choi codified TKD into a coherent system, drawing on heritage that stretched thousands of years into the mists of Korea's distant pass. Dispelling the Fog A Killing Art dispelled that fog, showing that TKD, like most martial arts currently practiced and claiming thousands of years of history, is an "invented tradition," to use the term coined by researchers Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their 1983 book The Invention of Tradition . At the time I read Gillis' book, I was not aware that forces were in play that indic...