Francis Ford Coppola drew the parallels between Joseph Conrad's novel and the war in Vietnam when he directed "Apocalypse Now" in 1979. It is not much of a stretch to see our latest international debacle as an updating of Conrad's prophetic tale -- perhaps even more apocalyptic than what Coppola envisioned 25 years ago. Light and illumination, liberation from savagery for the dark continent, have morphed into instilling stability in the Middle East. Instead of ivory, it's oil. And instead of humanity and instruction, it's another cycle of violence. Bodies are everywhere -- just as they are in Conrad's story -- most of them belonging to the people whose country has been invaded.

Granted, when Conrad published his novel in 1902, most readers did not interpret the text as we do today, as a condemnation of colonialism, but rather as a warning: "Look out, Whitey, or you may regress to the savagery of the black continent." They were comfortable with their assumptions of superiority and absolutely certain that what they were doing was right, if not ordained by their faith. It was simply that Kurtz had gone a little too far, fallen into the alleged depravity of the people whose lives he was supposed to improve. At the conclusion of the manuscript intended for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, Kurtz appended four words: "Exterminate all the brutes."

But isn't it unfair to compare a character in a novel and our leaders in the United States, a situation more than a hundred years ago during the colonialist era in Africa and our current desire to bring stability to the Middle East?

Not really. The lesson of "Heart of Darkness" is that European powers are accountable to no one: They can do whatever they want in the non-Western world. This is little different from America's assumptions in Iraq today. We are such an important nation that we believe we can ignore the world's opinion. Confronted with the latest unspeakable rites of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison, which clearly resulted from policy decisions taken at the highest levels of government, our leaders continue to demonstrate an appalling lack of leadership. They have only grudgingly admitted guilt, and have seized upon Nicholas Berg's grisly beheading to excuse or obscure America's own shocking misdeeds. To cite Tom DeLay, "The image of these murderers is a shocking reminder of the people we're up against. They are not soldiers. They're monsters, they're terrorists, and we will not rest until every last one of them is in a cell or a cemetery."

They're monsters; we're not. They're evil; we're good. DeLay's simplistic moralizing ignores the fact that it was the certainty that we were dealing with "monsters" that led to the sadistic abuses at Abu Ghraib. It also overlooks the fact that Berg's murder did not take place in a vacuum. Horror leads to horror. Has he already forgotten that it was the United States that let the genie out of the bottle in the first place? Or our president's war cry from several months ago, "Bring it on!" As Conrad wrote more than a hundred years ago, the darkness is now in all of us.

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