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In Counterfeit Crime, economist, historian, and criminologist R.T. Naylor offers a scathing critique of government policies on transnational crime and terror.
Joel Yanofsky sat down with the author to discuss his latest book, which Naylor claims is his “angiest and most cynical” to date. The following is an excerpt from the exclusive McGill News Magazine interview.
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Don’t believe anything until it’s officially denied.
The above quote, almost matter-of-factly mistrustful, has graced Tom Naylor’s office door for the past two decades, roughly half the time he’s taught economics at McGill. Coincidentally, the warning on the door, attributed to Irish writer Claud Cockburn, could just as easily serve as the title of most of Naylor’s 12 books, especially his latest, Counterfeit Crime: Criminal Profits, Terror Dollars, and Nonsense.
According to Naylor, the new book is his “angriest and most cynical” to date. It matches its author’s corrosive style with his lifelong disposition for debunking officialdom’s conventional wisdom. “There’s a lot of stuff in this book I’ve wanted to get off my chest for a long time,” Naylor adds from his office in the Leacock Building.
Of course, this may be the hardest thing to believe about the consistently controversial and combative Naylor. After taking on everything from rampant consumerism (Crass Struggle) to state-sponsored crime (Patriots and Profiteers), you can’t help wondering how he has anything left to get off his chest. “I tend to be quite frank,” he says, a rare understatement from a man not normally given to understatement.
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It’s no coincidence either that he chose to come to McGill and Montreal at a time when “all the anglos were starting to leave.” It was the beginning of the seventies, and “there were debates everywhere,” he recalls. “All kinds of things were possible.”Naylor comes by his predisposition for argument naturally. Despite growing up in “a dinky little Southern Ontario town,” he and his three siblings all ended up with PhDs and one went on to become the president of the University of Toronto. “I don’t think I set out to disturb things,” he says. “I think things deserve to be disturbed. It was part of my upbringing.”
But if he’s more cynical about university life now than he was then, he still believes that in a world increasingly controlled by market forces and manipulative governments, universities remain a last refuge of independent thought. McGill has certainly been that for Naylor, a man whose shyness and outspokenness manage to coexist. In the end, he admits, “There’s not much I haven’t said.”
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To learn more about Counterfeit Crime, click here.
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