colin powell knows teh googles

Colin Powell has long been one of my heroes, mostly due to his pragmatism when it comes to real world issues. Here’s a great interview with Colin in GQ magazine with him. I started reading it, kinda nodding along, as he wasn’t really covering any new ground for me, even when he says something insightful like:

We are taking too much counsel of our fears. [...] Yes, there are a few dangerous nuts in Brooklyn and New Jersey who want to blow up Kennedy Airport and Fort Dix. These are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them. But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.

But what really blew me away was when he said:

Q: Would you really bet on a country that feels it necessary to censor Google?

A: China will not be censoring Google forever, and most Chinese teenagers know how to go to proxy servers, anyway. The Chinese leaders know they can’t block full access to the Internet forever, but they’re trying to control it.

In an interview where he talks about what went wrong in Iraq and exporting Jeffersonian democracy and reforming the middle east, he also goes and throws off a one-liner about proxy servers! My hero for life.

Colin Powell is in ur internets, accessing ur blocked seitz!