ASPI propagandists’ rank hypocrisy exposed!

The nominally “Australian” think tank behind the widely reported accusations that China is using its Uyghur Muslim minority as forced labour is itself sponsored by American and British arms companies that have profited from forced prison labour. This is according to an explosive report today by Marcus Reubenstein in APAC.news, Michael West Media and Pearls and Irritations, “ASPI’s forced labour links”.

The Citizens Party has exposed the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) as a foreign interference operation in Australia, funded by the US State Department and other foreign governments, NATO, and multinational weapons manufacturers, to force Australian foreign policy to follow the USA’s hostile turn against China to the detriment of Australia’s relationship with our biggest trading partner.

A recent five-part series published in the Citizens Party’s Australian Alert Service, “The China narrative”, by researcher Melissa Harrison, revealed ASPI’s central role alongside ASIO and a small gang of academics, journalists and politicians in relentlessly hyping accusations against China, including that China is persecuting Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps and as slave labour.

While those claims are unproven, this report by Marcus Reubenstein identifies 11 of ASPI’s funders which have used and continue to use forced prison labour in their supply chains, including BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and the US government itself, which owns the world’s largest prison labour company.

As Reubenstein reports, “US government-owned UNICOR has 110 factories in at least 65 Federal prisons across the United States. Inmates manufacture a wide array of products for both civilian and military applications, with 16 of its prison factories specialising in the manufacture of electronics. The company also supplies the US Military, whose government gives both direct and indirect financial support to ASPI.”

By contrast, when ASPI’s claims about Uyghur forced labour are examined in detail, there is little evidence of anything other than the Chinese government incentivising job placement agencies to find jobs for Uyghurs as part of its poverty-reduction and deradicalisation programs.

ASPI stands exposed as supremely hypocritical propagandists, a foreign-backed front for the war machine that has left mass death and destruction in its wake in the Middle East and is now targeting China with accusations that have the same credibility as the claims of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. If Australians want to understand the motives and credibility of the organisations pushing us towards conflict with China, which they should, they must read “ASPI’s forced labour links”.