Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire (Paperback)
Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a non-fiction book about what writer William Burroughs called, “the backlash and bad karma of empire.” Set against the author’s month-long trip to London, Vietnam and Thailand in early 1991, it tells how the American empire was created by rapacious businessmen backed by a murderous military establishment, media moguls who designed a relentless psychological warfare campaign that glorifies warriors who are programmed to kill on command, and clerics who contrived a religious justification for imperialism, the subordination of women, and the establishment of chattel slavery. Pisces Moon shows how these mythmakers, led by CIA drug traffickers after World War Two, destroyed much of Southeast Asia. It also tells how the myth of American greatest has come home to roost and is now manifest as the vainglorious, militant Christian nationalist movement that wishes to establish a right-wing dictatorship. Pisces Moon argues that the survival of American democracy, and the world, depends upon people being able to distinguish between material evidence and substantiated facts on the one hand, and conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, and supremacist myths on the other.
Douglas Valentine is the author of four books of historical nonfiction: The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, and The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA. He is the author of the novel TDY, and a book of poems, A Crow’s Dream. He is also the editor of the poetry anthology With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century. Valentine lives with his wife, Alice, in Massachusetts.
"If one seriously desires … to deeply understand the lurid details and the frightening karma and dark arts of US empire, read this book! The author has seriously documented the extreme dangers of the inseparability of US politics, economics, and organized crime. The CIA and military propaganda have led to a serious dumbing down, enabling popular political corruption and neo-fascism." —S Brian Willson, author, trained lawyer, activist, Viet Nam veteran
"Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a riveting book by a great investigative journalist that sheds important insights into the working of the CIA and on the underlying ideology guiding the U.S. empire and its bad karma that has resulted in the country’s dangerous lurch to the right.” —Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing editor of Covert Action Magazine and author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (2012)
"In a beautifully written, idiosyncratic memoir-travelogue, a blend of Graham Greene and Rick Steves, Doug Valentine recounts his adventures in Vietnam and Thailand in 1991. Doug caught the BBC in bed with the CIA, whitewashing its opium and heroin trafficking around the world and the slaughter of millions it unleashed across South-East Asia." —Nicolas Davies, British investigative journalist, writer, and documentary maker
"Douglas Valentine is our most unflinching chronicler of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bloody and sordid history. In this book, Valentine unfolds his vast and detailed knowledge of the Agency, and its twisted subculture, in the context of a first-person recollection of a long and surreal research trip through South East Asia. Filled with dingy bars, broken men, humid cities, and slabs of corrupt, covert, and violent history, the landscape comes alive; and the world of the Central Intelligence Agency emerges as even more deranged than you had recalled. Compelling yet tragic, Pisces Moon is compulsive reading."—Dr. Christian Parenti, professor of political economy at John Jay College, CUNY; author of Tropic of Chaos and Radical Hamilton
“Doug, I just finished recording your book today, so it’s in edit now. It’s brilliant! At the same time informative, shocking, emotionally compelling. Thank you for writing it! Reading it has been an honor.” –Stefan Rudnicki, award winning audiobook narrator, director and producer.
"Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a riveting book by a great investigative journalist that sheds important insights into the working of the CIA and on the underlying ideology guiding the U.S. empire and its bad karma that has resulted in the country’s dangerous lurch to the right.” —Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing editor of Covert Action Magazine and author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (2012)
"In a beautifully written, idiosyncratic memoir-travelogue, a blend of Graham Greene and Rick Steves, Doug Valentine recounts his adventures in Vietnam and Thailand in 1991. Doug caught the BBC in bed with the CIA, whitewashing its opium and heroin trafficking around the world and the slaughter of millions it unleashed across South-East Asia." —Nicolas Davies, British investigative journalist, writer, and documentary maker
"Douglas Valentine is our most unflinching chronicler of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bloody and sordid history. In this book, Valentine unfolds his vast and detailed knowledge of the Agency, and its twisted subculture, in the context of a first-person recollection of a long and surreal research trip through South East Asia. Filled with dingy bars, broken men, humid cities, and slabs of corrupt, covert, and violent history, the landscape comes alive; and the world of the Central Intelligence Agency emerges as even more deranged than you had recalled. Compelling yet tragic, Pisces Moon is compulsive reading."—Dr. Christian Parenti, professor of political economy at John Jay College, CUNY; author of Tropic of Chaos and Radical Hamilton
“Doug, I just finished recording your book today, so it’s in edit now. It’s brilliant! At the same time informative, shocking, emotionally compelling. Thank you for writing it! Reading it has been an honor.” –Stefan Rudnicki, award winning audiobook narrator, director and producer.