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Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire Audiobook
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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.
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“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
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“Bad ‘karma’ indeed. And Douglas Valentine is one of our best chroniclers of this grand ‘karmic’ collapse. Pisces Moon gives ample context to the US’s moral, ethical, and material tumble. It is an essential read.”
— Dissident Voice -
“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.”
— S. Brian Willson, Viet Nam veteran -
“Douglas Valentine is our most unflinching chronicler of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bloody and sordid history…Compelling yet tragic, Pisces Moon is compulsive reading.”
— Dr. Christian Parenti, professor of political economy at John Jay College, CUNY, and author of Tropic of Chaos -
"A riveting book…Sheds important insights into the working of the CIA and on the underlying ideology guiding the US 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 US foreign policy, including Modernizing Repression
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About 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.
About Stefan Rudnicki
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.