Bøger af Douglas Valentine

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.

We live in a world increasingly fearful of terrorism and catalyzed by programmed events and developments whose sources are often unclear. This book provides insight into the paradigmatic approaches evolved by CIA decades ago in Vietnam which remain operational practices today in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

';An important work.' John Prados, author of President's Secret Wars ';This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians.' Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade