And yet... quite a few of the seniors I was referring to are not from the ITF; quite a few are. I really think it has to do with experience and training, more than it does with organizational affiliation.
This is completely plausible to me; my own sahbumnim, Allen Shirley, and his friend and associate, the late Gm. Darell Trudo; our own Kwan Jang, Master David Hughes, and many, many others, including many of our TKD friends on MT, have been wellsprings of information on the true background of the art. I wasn't really thinking of individuals so much in this context; I've actually had very little disagreement with most of the people who have solid records of achievement in the TKD world. It's not really individuals per se that I was thinking of...
Much more characteristic is the stack of books on TKD on my shelf, many of which, in the obligatory chapter, repeat the 'Three Kingdoms/Hwarang/Ancient TKD/High Kicks to Dismount An Attacker' mantra ad nauseum, ignoring what is by now a huge body of critical literature that systematically dismantles every component of this duplicitous sales pitch. And this includes some very recent books by authors who should certainly know better, who had every chance to see some of the major contributions in that critical literature on TKD history I just mentioned. In 1999, six years after Young's exhaustive study of Taekyon appeared in
Journal of Asian Martial Arts, and two years after Dakin Burdicks crucial followup piece in the same journal, a major textbook of WTF-style sports TKD,
Taekwondo: the State of the Art—it has nine altogether useless pages devoted to 'self-defense' out of nearly three hundred—spends its whole first chapter, on 'The History of Taekwondo, repeating Three Kingdoms military history as though
any connection could be established between modern TKD and whatever the inhabitants of the Korea were doing 2000 years ago in their endless fighting on the peninsula, and full of empty handwaving along the lines of, `There is
every reason to believe that tae kyon, or soo bahk, flourished during [the Koryo era, around the 10th c. AD]' (my emphasis). This, without a single line of supporting evidence, or citation, or reference to the many unnamed sources cited in the chapter that supposedly validate this kind of hokum. And this is far from the worst such 'History of Taekwondo' chapter in the books in my collection. The TKD sites on the web are still worse; I've given up counting the number of web pages claiming that TKD has a well-established two-millenia-old history on the peninsula, citing as evidence facts shown by Young, Burdick and Henning as far back as a decade and a half to have no connection whatever to TKD, or anything specifically Korean.
What's at issue isn't really the veracity of individuals (though there are, of course, many cases where individuals are happy to act as mouthpieces for this sort of historical scamming) so much as the duplicity of organizations and federations. The USA Taekwondo site I posted that link to is just one example, but it exemplifies the worst that's out there, and that's pretty bad, I think—and very, very widespread.