“Tragedies of Crusade of 1000 Years Ago Is Repeating in Today’s Iraq”

“Qin Shi Huangdi ordered all the history books to be burned as well as scholars to be burned and buried because he was ‘afraid of being criticized of the present based on facts borrowed from the past’.” We can reflect on our present if we closely take a look at the past. However, we seem to repeat the same errors of the past through the 9/11 attack and the war in Iraq.

Kim Tae-gwon (28, picture), writer of a recently released comic book “Crusade Story – Shock and Horror” series says, “I wanted to look at the reality of today, such as the war in Iraq, through the Crusade of 1000 years ago.

He graduated from Seoul National University with a major in Aesthetics as a member of the class of 1994 (In Korea, this counted as the year one enters a college). Kim has drawn critical cartoons for many university newspapers. His comics are currently published on “Pressian,” an Internet news website, and he plans to publish the comic series in six volumes until the year 2005.

“Crusade Story” is full of sarcasm and humor through metaphors of the current situations and using techniques to reflect the present onto the mirror of the past. For example, when depicting a scene where the Crusade is rationalizing its attacks, he directly uses the quote of President George W. Bush saying, “Our armies are working to accomplish a sacred duty.”

The Crusaders, who were “confident in being chosen as the ones to clear of non-believers,” were a group of unprepared people. The first Crusaders led by Hermit Pierre departed Rome according to the expedition plan by Pope Urbanus II. They did not know the way to Jerusalem and also did not bring food with them. They mistook a Jewish village in southern Germany for Jerusalem and indiscriminately killed peasants in Hungary to get food.

“The first Crusaders were mostly naïve and poor peasants. They were not rascals from the beginning. However, they did not hesitate to commit massacre after being surrounded with self-righteousness and group madness. They died miserable deaths in a locked fortress in Turkey. They were also another type of victims of the Crusade.”

The merits of this book is that the writer has read more than 50 books in Korea and abroad related to the Crusade and drew the comics. He read Steve Runciman’s “The History of the Crusade” and Joe Oldenbrug’s “The Crusade” in English as well as Jacques Le Goff’s “Middle Age History of the West,” Amin Malouf’s “The Crusade through the Eyes of Arabs,” and others in versions translated into Korean. He set these books he read as basic texts and read the first historical documents and related literature of 50 books. He also drew characters in the comics in similar images to the portraits of the time.

“There is a sarcastic humor which states that ‘the only fruit that they got out of the Crusade was the apricot’. The only thing they got from the war was that the apricot spread throughout Europe. All the other things they got from the Crusade could have been obtained even without the war. Violence to prevent violence only stimulates other forms of violence. It took about two centuries until the madness of the Crusade disappeared.”

suhchoi@donga.com