Heart Of Darkness Response Assignment :: essays research papers

They were dying slowly-it was clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but pitch-black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confused in the greenish sobriety. (page 14 para. 3, line 1).The quote is coming from Marlow, upon arriving at the outer station, and initiative witnessing the devastation the Belgians have caused the native peoples. He is speaking nigh the black men, who have been enslaved, dying all around him. He go off specify the work they are being made to do, and finds it a great horror, similar, perhaps, to what sine must be like. This quote also shows Marlows first actualization to an epiphany, he will later realize, as imperialism. He says clearly, these men corporation not be viewed as criminals, for the only function they seemed to be carrying out was dying, and die they did, in great numbers, and at the hands of the enlightened Europeans. I believe his conscience was getting the better of him, firs t seeing the death, disease, starvation, and topsy-turvyness all around, allusions of a modern day genocide, which righteous people can not stand to watch, but are helpless to do anything about it. Descriptions of Africans dying, or more(prenominal) precisely, being killed, are common stories surrounding imperialism. kindling of Darkness, finely details the worst kind of African imperialism, the Belgian kind. Millions of people, in what now is called the Congo, were forcefully enslaved, and then made to gather ivory tusks, and sorry plants, all the time being treated as animals, for the bushel intent of lining the pockets of the Belgian monarchy. These scenes shock the more caring, and kind hearted reader, in todays world, and leave questions swirling in the mind about how atrocities, similar to the ones set forth in Heart of Darkness, could have been carried out, by a supposed more enlightened society. Surprisingly enough, European imperialists do not hold the sole rights t o death and destruction. In fact, simply by reading a fib book of the last 2000 years, the reader may come to the conclusion that imperialism was a natural part of empire expansion. Just look at the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Huns, the Moslems, the Christians, and at last the British. What did they all have in common, first they all conquered territory, and usually to do this they needed to kill indigenous people, so that they could use newly conquered land, for their needs.