Viggo Mortensen
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What the United States has been doing for the past year is bombing innocent civilians without having come anywhere close to catching Osama bin Laden or any presumed enemy, and, as a distraction, we're now--apparently it's a given--we're hell bent on increasing the bombing that's been going on for the past eleven years in Iraq.

And the idea is--in that comparison--is that the United States is like the good guys in our movie against the bad guys in our movie and I think the opposite is true unfortunately.

I would not have continually bombed innocent civilians from 30,000 feet with no possibility of being accurate and maiming and killing and destroying the lives of many more people than died at the World Trade Center. What does that do? Does bombing people make us safer? Does bombing people make us more loved or appreciated overseas? Will this be forgotten? "Oh well, it was just a little mistake."

There's nothing wrong with responding. It's how do you respond. The fact that if one even questions the way that we responded, that that's considered some kind of fifth column thinking, that it's treasonous, and that those attacks are used as an excuse to limit civil liberties in this country, and that we are coercing other countries whose populations... England, for example. I saw a poll where 70 percent of English people say they are more afraid of George Bush than they are of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Because we are... our government is incredibly violent and aggressive and rapacious. And we want to control those regions. It's beyond a response. And there are other ways, I would think, of responding. We've done this before in our history. Even World War II. Was it necessary to kill so many civilians in Dresden and places like that? Was it necessary to do things that way? It's hindsight and so forth. But here we are now. We've been doing this for a year in Afghanistan; we've been doing it for eleven years in Iraq. Can we not think about this? You know, I read in The New York Times--which you have here, I looked at it yesterday--the front page is, it's not even, "should we do this?" or is it a question. It's just the countdown--as if it was a holiday countdown--for the big war and this and that. And then the Science or whatever section... it's bigger weapons and faster vehicles for the military. And then photographs of the women serving. It's all kind of fun. And it's like the people on the ground in those countries, who are the ones who are being affected, they're invisible. If they're not American, if they're not European, they don't exist, they're disposable. And more of them have died in the past year than died at the World Trade Center. What... does that mean anything? And now just because we focused on Iraq for many reasons, not the least of which is oil...

And some kind of vendetta maybe that our President's father has... Who knows what the reasons are? It doesn't really matter.

Viggo Mortensen against the war
Excerpt from Charlie Rose interview, December 03, 2002
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news7/news318.html

Actor Viggo Mortensen appeared at a Tokyo press conference to promote his latest film, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, wearing a "No More Blood for Oil!" T-shirt.

Posted 2/3/2003 11:51 PM
Anti-war words fit to a T By Alison Maxwell, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-02-03-anti-war_x.htm