Fold – Forever War

Forever War calls out the military-industrial complex for enabling endless wars in the name of profit

Aided by Mint Press CEO Mnar Adley’s brilliant journalism and the voices of other luminary thinkers, we are calling out the military-industrial complex for enabling forever wars in the name of profit, just as Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. Defence contractors routinely lobby governments for more and longer wars on behalf of companies like Lockheed Martin and RTX (especially the US) in order to sell more weapons and generate greater profits, even when it means abetting genocide and other horrific atrocities. To us, this is the elephant in the room and the only way to stop war is to take the profit out of it.

We wanted to respond as best we could with empathy and reason to the horrors unfolding in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere. As the principal songwriter, Seth channelled his own personal history into this track: the ancestral trauma of losing half of his extended family in the Holocaust, living in New York on 9/11 and in London during the 2005 bombings. It is intended to evoke sensations of war.

Mnar Adley’s narrative takes centre stage in the verses with additional passages from Alice Walker and Lorraine Hansberry. The Forever War hook itself is voiced by an expanse of figures including Kurt Vonnegut, Noam Chomsky, Douglas Adams, bell hooks, Mike Ruppert and more. The effect is like a council of elders reaching a solemn consensus. Angela Davis makes a subtle cameo doubling the phrase ‘military-industrial complex.’ All of these people have had something crucial to say on the subject of war.