In reality, “the Company” was formed by King Leopold II of Belgium charged with running the country of the Congo Free State in 1885. The Congo Free State was voted into existence by the Congress of Berlin, which Marlow (Conrad’s narrator of the story) refers to sarcastically as "the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs."
Marlow describes this Company as the “white sepulchre,” a term used by Mathew (New Testament) to describe a hypocrite. “I had no difficulty in finding the Company’s offices. It was the biggest thing in the town, and everybody I met was full of it. They were going to run an overseas empire, and make no end of coin by trade.”
Like other industrialized countries, the U.S. has a history of fabricating a casus belli when certain special interest groups wanted to invade and exploit a territory.
The US navy ship USS Maine sank in the Havana Harbor from an explosion whose cause at first was attributed to Spanish cannon. Later, after investigation, it was found that the boiler exploded from a design defect. Some critics claim that the explosion was a purposeful act to create a phony casus belli, justifying the US to attack the Spanish, triggering the Spanish-American War in which the US government accused the Spaniards of being responsible for the explosion. Some historians claim that the initial “special interest groups” were journalists, particularly William R. Hearst, who simply wanted to sell more newspapers.
From this incident the critics coined the term “yellow journalism” to describe how the media can fuel public outrage over an issue to the point of a crisis such as war, simply because doing so prompts people to buy more newspapers or drives up advertising revenues for TV News. It sounds and smells like our current main stream media that panders to advertisers.
The Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican militaries. It served as the primary justification for U.S. President James K. Polk's declaration of war against Mexico in 1846, sparking the Mexican-American War.
In the case of the movie, Apocalypse Now, a fabricated casus belli occurred in 1964, when U.S. President Johnson claimed that North Vietnamese forces had twice attacked an American destroyer, USS Maddox, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Although North Vietnamese attacked once in response to U.S. equipped and orchestrated South Vietnam's commando raids on the coast, claims of a second attack were later proven to be lies from the White House to pressure Congress’s approval for war. Known today as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, this led to the open involvement of the U.S. in the Vietnam War.
Other examples of casus belli raise their ugly heads everywhere in the histories of various countries. This is one of the central topics in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The story Marlow tells points out that the most civilized, socially adapted and respected members of society are very well skilled at conjuring up the most convincing excuses for pouncing on a weaker person or country in order to reap the booty and bling.
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