Trump Launches World’s Largest, Deadliest Aircraft Carrier
July 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Saturday, July 22, U.S. imperialism’s current godfather, Donald Trump, launched his latest grave threat to humanity and the world.
He commissioned the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest, deadliest aircraft carrier in history, capable of carrying more warplanes and weapons, and launching more air strikes than any carrier before. This carrier, which will become operational around 2021, is part of a massive naval and military buildup by a military that already dwarfs all other militaries on the planet. And Trump made clear he intends to use this new weapon of American mass death and destruction.
Trump called this death machine an “incredible work of art” part of “the noble military history of our great nation,” and a “100,000-ton message to the world, American might is second to none, and we’re getting bigger. and better, and stronger every day of my administration.”
He declared:
Wherever this vessel cuts through the horizon, our allies will rest easy and our enemies will shake with fear, because everyone will know that America is coming and America is coming strong....This ship is the deterrent that keeps us from having to fight in the first place, but this ship also ensures that if a fight does come, it will always end the same way: we will win, win, win. We will never lose. We will win.... When it comes to battle, we don’t want a fair fight, we want just the opposite. We demand victory, and we will have total victory, believe me.
What’s this “noble military history of our great nation” Trump referred to? The genocide of Native Americans? The slaughter of tens of thousands in America’s conquest of the Philippines, captured in gruesome pictures of skulls piled high? Or did he mean the firebombing of Tokyo during World War 2, incinerating 100,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians? Or perhaps the nuclear incineration of 250,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? He may well have been talking about the napalming and use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, mass murdering three million and poisoning millions of acres of countryside. But then it could have been America’s 1991 slaughter in Iraq, or its 2003 “shock and awe” blitzkrieg of Baghdad, or its latest death-from-above campaign in Mosul.
And what has America carried out this death and destruction for? To maintain a global empire of enslavement and oppression—enforcing the most brutal exploitation—from Mexican laborers harvesting its food in pesticide-poisoned fields to children stitching its clothes and soccer balls in death-trap sweatshops in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Allying with murderous military butchers, or medieval religious butchers, all to keep it operating.
America was NEVER great.
Trump’s “win, win, win” message? A declaration that under his fascist rule, America will double-down, triple-down its violence and death to try and maintain its grip on the horrendous, unjust world it presides over. When Trump talks of never losing, of not wanting a “fair fight,” of demanding victory, “total victory,” he’s threatening genocidal—possibly nuclear—annihilation of those the U.S. can’t conquer.
Does anyone need a more glaring reason to drive this fascist regime from power? Or a more glaring illustration of the bankruptcy of the entire system he heads and the urgent need to dig into the revolutionary solution to the horrors it has created and now promises on an even more massive, globally threatening scale?
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