Jong Il, Remy, Kautilya, Hotties, and Errant Nukes

Has mercurial fantasist and Hollywood buff Kim Jong Il sacked Remy Martin and enlisted the services of Kautilya?

Kim Jong Il has ordered soldiers to stay away from drinking, sex and money, calling them "poison" that spoils socialist faith, a South Korea-based group of defectors from North Korea claimed Thursday.

Kim issued the order in March, saying alcohol, sex and money would make soldiers more vulnerable to the "psychological warfare of enemies," according to the Committee for Democratization of North Korea.

And now for a taste of Kautilya c/o Roger Boesche. (If by some freak chance you've missed Kautilya then have a shot at this short primer from which the excerpts below have been jacked. Machiavelli wasn't the first cat to get his pandering game on with web-toed royals)

Kautilya often advocated using women as weapons of war. He certainly regarded women as a source of satisfaction for troops at war, writing that when setting up camp for the army, "courtesans (should be encamped) along the highways." And Kautilya certainly saw women as an addictive source of pleasure, worse than wine or gambling, that a good king must enjoy only in moderation: "Deliverance is possible in gambling, without deliverance is addiction to women. Failure to show himself, aversion from work, absence of material good and loss of spiritual good by allowing the right time to pass, weakness in administration and addiction to drink (result from addiction to women)."

Precisely because women are such a powerful addiction, a king can use them against an enemy; for example, if a king is trying to undermine a ruling oligarchy, he "should make chiefs of the ruling council infatuated with women possessed of great beauty and youth. When passion is roused in them, they should start quarrels by creating belief (about their love) in one and by going to another." A woman supposedly in love with one leader should go to another, profess her love for him, urge him to murder the first leader, and "then she should proclaim, 'My lover has been killed by so and so.' Obviously such tactics create mistrust among leaders of an oligarchy and also bring about the death of key enemies.

In the chapters about how a weak king can stave off disastrous conquest by a stronger king, Kautilya again turned, as just one possible tactic among many, to women as weapons of war, stating that "keepers of prostitutes should make the (enemy's) army chiefs infatuated with women possessed of great beauty and youth. When many or two of the chiefs feel passion for one woman, assassins should create quarrels among them." Secret agents can destroy high officers in the enemy army either with poison or with "love-winning medicines."

There is much else of relevance in the primer: especially when trying to figure out wtf's up with prodromals like this. (Hint: The affairs of one, who cannot maintain secrecy, . . . undoubtedly perish, like a broken boat in the ocean." In Kautilya's foreign policy, even during a time of diplomacy and negotiated peace, a king should still be "striking again and again" in secrecy. Was that writ too large?)