Jacksonwald native Joel K. Harding and wife, Denise Portugues Harding, on a visit to Red Square in Moscow. Joel Harding has been invited by NATO to speak on information warfare, propaganda and strategic uses of disinformation in the digital age.
Call it schadenfreude.
The term describes enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of others.In my case, I’ve recently had the sensation after reading stories about Russian misadventures and ineptitudes in their prosecution of the war against Islamic State.
I get a lot of my information from this newspaper and others, but other interesting stuff I’ve been reading lately is either authored or aggregated by my buddy Joel K. Harding.
I’ve written here a couple times before about Joel. He’s the guy who went from being a Reading Eagle newspaper carrier in his Jacksonwald neighborhood to an Army Special Forces warrior to an intelligence officer working with the Defense Department, CIA, NSA and others. Now he is a consultant on information operations, strategic communication and cyberwarfare.
Last week, Joel was notified that his blog, To Inform is to Influence, had been blocked by the Russians. The embargo coincided with a few of Joel’s more insightful and incisive posts about Russian propaganda.
Russian information warfare is a serious problem, I’ve been flat in their face for most of the past 20 months,” Joel said Friday.
”The head of Russian propaganda (Dr. Igor Panarin) hates me,” he added. “Therefore, I consider myself a success.”
Joel apologized for missing an earlier phone call.
“I was on the phone with NATO,” he said. “They’ve invited me to speak on Tuesday about how NATO can best combat Russian propaganda and disinformation.”
In a recent blog post, Joel wrote that he ascribes the theory that, based on its Internet activity, Russia has become a “Troll State.”
A troll’s purpose in Internet chat rooms is to suppress and overwhelm opposition and distract and disrupt a conversation. Russian trolls do the same thing through anti-American propaganda. The key is to not allow honest argument of the topic at hand, Joel wrote.
But there is now blowback from all of Russia’s propaganda. In recent blog posts, Joel has listed stories about:
Russians from mostly Muslim Chechnya organizing classes to stave off Islamic State recruitment. Thousands of Russian Muslims have joined ISIS in Syria, and some have taken senior positions. More conservative estimates from Chechnya said last month that less than 500 Chechens are believed to have joined ISIS and that about 200 of them have already been killed.
Last week, a person ISIS alleged was a Russian spy trying to infiltrate the terrorist group was beheaded on camera. ISIS then threatened to kill Russian civilians in their homes.
A Russian bomber was shot down when it allegedly invaded Turkish air space and then came a report that Russia had bombed grain silos in Syria in clear violation of international laws of armed conflict.
Joel agreed with my assessment that in this rare instance where Russians and Americans are fighting in the same Middle East conflict, it’s not just the Americans who are being portrayed in the media as inept or doing more harm than good.
And from his perspective, it was nice to see the Russian propaganda machine taking a few hits. He pointed to one of his favorite examples.
“Dr. Igor Panarin, the head of Russian propaganda, predicted the U.S. would be split into six separate countries by 2010,” he said. “It is such a popular theory in Russia that nobody cares that it isn’t true.”
Joel said one thing that stops U.S. officials from hitting back in Russia’s propaganda war against us is that Congress isn’t convinced we’re losing the war, or that it matters sufficiently.
That’s why Joel and like-minded strategists are working to convince Congress it’s worth the cost.