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“But we must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army… They lie. They lie, and we have to be merciful for those who lie. Those nabobs.” These words, spoken by Colonel Kurtz in the Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, describe the disgust Kurtz has at American and Western involvement in Indochina. This film and message by Kurtz parallels with the theme of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, from which the movie was based. In Conrad’s work, he uses descriptive details of his accounts in European Africa. Those “blank spaces on the earth”(22) Conrad and his protagonist for the novel, Marlow, dreamed of journeying to were finally accessible to them during the turn of the century - At the exact moment East and Central Africa were falling under the dominion of European colonialism. Marlow, like Conrad’s life experience, is sent on his mission, and it is his story with his eerie, descriptive details of that mission that warns of the perils of European dominance and expansion. It is clear early in the novel that Conrad is making a negative statement about European imperialism. Marlow’s first journey occurs on the French steamer shipping down the