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Heart Of Darkness And Apocalypse Now Reflecting Man's Dark Nature

    Inherent inside every human soul is a savage evil side that
remains repressed by society. Often this evil side breaks out during
times of isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture
confronts another. History is loaded with examples of atrocities that
have occurred when one culture comes into contact with another.
Whenever fundamentally different cultures meet, there is often a fear
of contamination and loss of self that leads us to discover more about
our true selves, often causing perceived madness by those who have yet
to discover.

    The Puritans left Europe in hopes of finding a new world to
welcome them and their beliefs. What they found was a vast new world,
loaded with Indian cultures new to them. This overwhelming cultural
interaction caused some Puritans to go mad and try to purge themselves
of a perceived evil. This came to be known as the Salem witch trials.

    During World War II, Germany made an attempt to overrun Europe.
What happened when the Nazis came into power and persecuted the Jews
in Germany, Austria and Poland is well known as the Holocaust. Here,
humans evil side provides one of the scariest occurrences of this
century. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi counterparts conducted raids of the
ghettos to locate and often exterminate any Jews they found. Although
Jews are the most widely known victims of the Holocaust, they were not
the only targets. When the war ended, 6 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies,
homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists, and others targeted by
the Nazis, had died in the Holocaust. Most of these deaths occurred in
gas chambers and mass shootings. This gruesome attack was motivated
mainly by the fear of cultural intermixing which would impurify the
"Master Race."

    Joseph Conrads book, The Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppolas
movie, Apocalypse Now are both stories about Mans journey into his
self, and the discoveries to be made there. They are...