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
"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
"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