by Tommaso Leoni and Steven Reich

(…) Regardless of the rank or lack of rank of your prospective [Historical European Martial Arts] teacher, certain standards of skills and honesty should apply to anyone who offers to teach you. An amateur researcher claiming expertise in a style that he has never even read about is just as guilty as an individual claiming a Master’s certificate that he does not have.

The checklist is mostly designed to spot dishonesty, personality-cults, lack of real knowledge and lack of safety. The more of these points you can check off about your prospective instructor, the more likely it is that he may be someone who should be best avoided. In our opinion, if your prospective instructor displays more than five of these traits, you should do an about-face and run as fast as you can.

1) Does he claim absolute and equal mastery of multiple weapons, systems and related subjects? And do his claims of mastery change, especially when challenged?

2) Does the art he teaches have an unusual name, which he justifies by saying that what he practices is rare, pure and unique?

3) Does he frequently claim that what he teaches or practices is “the one, true way”?

4) If he claims an official Master’s or instructor’s title, does it come from a nonofficial source, a source with whom he may have a conflict of interest, or from bodies of which he was creator/co-creator?

5) Does he bestow official-sounding, community-wide titles or certificates in spite of having no official authority to do so? (This of course excludes Scholar’s titles or any such internal ranks aimed at showing progress within one’s own school.)

6) Is he silent or vague about the identity of his master(s)?

7) Has he ever claimed that his master(s) cannot be produced because they are ostensibly itinerant hermits or–even more conveniently–dead itinerant hermits? Does he not have believable documentation that his master existed–photographs, letters and the like?

8) Does he place his personal experience above the historical texts, making disparaging remarks about the texts and those who study them?

9) Does he claim to know historical texts of which he then demonstrates little or no knowledge? Does he claim to know texts that are only available in a language he does not understand?

10) Does he express himself vaguely and imprecisely, using terms in a non-consistent way and frequently misspelling names of Masters and techniques?

11) Does his following or audience consist mostly of his own acolytes? Is he generally unwilling to appear in venues other than his own, be it in person or on the Internet?

12) Does he promote a personality-cult centered on himself within his school or circle? The following five points on how to spot personality-cults in a leader are from the SOS Dallas web page:

i) Authoritarian approach and intolerance of questioning or criticism; lies about and insults opponents

ii) Leader shows anxiety about the world, speaking of threats and conspiracies against the group

iii) Leader regularly accuses dissatisfied members who leave of having something wrong with them, having personality disorders or being transgressors or deserters

iv) Ex members have similar stories of abuse and ill-treatment by the leader

v) The leader is always right and group members never feel they can be good enough

13) Does he have a controversial reputation with other schools or groups?

14) Does he frequently dismiss most other schools as being impure, sporty or eccentric and is he frequently the initiator of ad-hominem attacks against other schools or individuals?

15) Does he claim many “enemies” within the community, somehow posing as the innocent victim of all of them?

16) Does he claim to have fought duels or full-intent bouts with sharp swords?

17) Does he tolerate or, God forbid, promote injuries in his training sessions?

18) Does he display or advocate a brazenly gung-ho attitude towards swordsmanship, overusing expressions like “survival,” “real life” or “the street”?

19) Does his website feature poses that make no martial sense but that look impressive to the uninitiated? Does his website contain photographs or video clips of his martial performance that would be considered sub-par by any reasonable standard?

20) Does he claim in-depth knowledge of Asian martial arts, in which he also cannot demonstrate credentials? Do these Asian martial arts also have unusual-sounding names?

Excerpt from Legitimate Teachers in the WMA Community: Advice on How to Spot Bad European Budo