Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a sweeping critical analysis of Western colonialism, its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America.
Valentine focuses on the “dark arts” of empire: the black bag of CIA covert operations, including bribery, right-wing coups, assassinations, disinformation, and intimate relationships with drug, sex, and artifact traffickers. He pays especially close attention to the CIA’s use of psychological warfare to play upon the beliefs of people to shape their political and social movements. Pisces Moon shines a light on the central role played by missionaries, academics, writers, and filmmakers in assisting and promoting Western imperialism.
In the mid-1990s, based on his book The Phoenix Program, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) hired Valentine as a consultant to a documentary series it was making about the CIA’s activities in South Vietnam. Valentine embarked for London in February 1991 as the sun was about to enter Pisces, the astrological sign which rules deception, espionage, foreign things, prisons, and religion. The month-long trip began with five days in London, where Valentine was asked to carry ten thousand dollars in cash to the BBC crew in Vietnam. After a memorable week in Vietnam, Valentine spent two weeks traveling around Thailand interviewing expat CIA officers for his books on CIA drug smuggling. Unique in every respect, Pisces Moon features many prominent, historically significant CIA officers with whom he has interacted with while conducting his original research.
Throughout the narrative, Pisces Moon explains how decades of propaganda and disinformation directed against them by war planners, religious leaders, and corporate institutions have made it nearly impossible for Americans to distinguish fact from fiction; a descent into mass delusion that William Burroughs called “the backlash and bad karma of empire.”Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire will grab you from the beginning and won’t let go.
GenreHistory, Biography and Memoir, Politics and Government
Length13 hrs 28 mins
Narrated byStefan Rudnicki
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateMay 16, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
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About the author
Douglas Valentine
Douglas Valentine is an American journalist and the author of five works of historical nonfiction: The CIA as Organized Crime, The Strength of the Pack, The Strength of the Wolf, The Phoenix Program, and The Hotel Tacloban . He also wrote the novel TDY and a book of poems, A Crow’s Dream, and was the editor of the poetry anthology With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century. His articles have appeared regularly in Counter Punch, Consortium News, and elsewhere. Portions of his research materials are archived at Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center, at John Jay College, and at the National Security Archive, in both a Vietnam collection and a separate drug enforcement collection.View all by Douglas Valentine
