Claire's Brother
speaker
2,353 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jun
Claire's Brother’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The Liberian state extracted taxes and tribute from indigenous communities, relied on indigenous labor, and by the early 20th century, international investigations were uncovering systems of forced labor and human trafficking so severe that they generated an international scandal.
While the settlers themselves had once been victims of slavery and racial oppression, they recreated similar class and ethnic hierarchies in their state.
Liberia, of course, differs from many other settler colonies, but they retained the basic framework of a settler population, clearing sovereignty over territory inhabited by indigenous peoples and concentrating political and economic power in its own hands.
Now compare this to Israel.
From the late 19th century onward, Zionist organizations acquired land through purchases and violence.
Following the Nakba, which created one of the largest refugee populations in the modern world, the Palestinians which remained within Israel were subjected to military administration for years, while Palestinians in the occupied territories continued to live under a different legal regime than Israeli settlers.
The 1952 Citizenship Law and the 2018 Nation-State Law cemented the Jewish supremacist heart of the Zionist project.
And since 1967, settlement expansion in the West Bank has steadily increased, accompanied by land seizures, home demolitions, restrictions on movement, and the fragmentation of Palestinian communities.
And Gaza has been an open-air prison where settlers occasionally mow the lawn, a.k.a.
slaughter the population, since 2007.
It's worth noting a major difference between the two cases, which is the demographic element.
American Liberians remained a small minority ruling a much larger indigenous population, but the entire history of American Liberians ruled Liberia.
Those kind of demographics are more akin to settler societies like South Africa, Rhodesia, and French Algeria, which leaned heavily into the exploitation aspect of colonialism.
Israel developed differently, intentionally, to ensure that Jewish people became the demographic majority within its territory.
So it's more comparable to settler societies like the US, Canada, and Australia.
Such demographics necessarily led to a difference in how indigenous peoples were managed between projects.
Liberia's system depended upon indigenous labor, while Israel's project has generally prioritized securing land while minimizing dependence on Palestinian labor.
In many periods of Zionist history, Palestinian labor was actively displaced in favor of exclusively Jewish labor.
But again, settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination.
That might often be expulsion and extermination, but it can also mean assimilation, confinement, and whatever else.
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