Camsterdam: How I got Caught in the Crosshairs of the War on Terror is a book written by Simon Fidler as his first-hand account of pervasive surveillance of citizens by intelligence agencies. It exposes a scary prospect when an innocent citizen's joke about the country's Prime Minister is not liked by an operative and she wants to fix him. What she has to do is just to get the guy's name included in the list of persons with terrorist connections.
What Simon shows in the book is universal; it is not limited to some rogue or autocratic countries but even the most liberal nations, and it happens all the time - irrespective of whether the country is being ruled by a Gandhi or Mandela or by an Idi Amin or Kim Jong-un. In fact, in Simon's case, it happened in "the mother of democracy", Britain.
The problem is that when you give power to a human, he/ she will abuse it (unless they are ethical to the core, but in that case either they will not pick up such a profession or their own colleagues will not let them survive). Power gives the kick that nothing else, even sex, can give.
It is for you to believe the story in its entirety or take a part of it as paranoia. However, you cannot shrug off the underlying theme: innocent citizens being hounded by operatives for their own games. They have all the power, and they are above law (even if there is a law to check them; in fact anti-terror laws in a majority of countries are very arbitrary) because they can create proof out of nothing, they have all the initiative while the victim can only react or try to defend himself/ herself, the victim is taken as a crook unless he/ she proves innocence, and they do not lose sleep or personal money in litigation, etc while the victim pays heavily. Nothing can compensate for the day-in and day-out pain and horror that the victim has to live with.
Even if you take part of the book as an outcome of paranoia (as perhaps his sister thinks), who was responsible for the current mental state of the author? If you think that it cannot be that the perpetrators were spending so much energy on one person without harming him terminally, you could only be partially correct - depending on individual cases. Once they have a person tagged as a possible terrorist, he becomes a guinea pig for operatives because they get to earn their promotion or foreign training, or meet their targets or prove a point just by harassing the tagged person. Whatever they report about the person proves that they were doing their job and it proves that the person is in fact guilty.
I think, the act of tagging and perpetual lynching of the victim are commonplace. It is only a matter of chance or luck if you are not chosen as the victim.
From a reading point of view, the persona of some perpetrators are not as well-developed as others. I also think the section on giant humans living on earth takes away some of the seriousness of the topic. The book gives links to relevant resources, which add to the context.
The prose is racy, and the first-person narration makes it intimate and believable. Since the author has gone through the pain himself, it comes out in every sentence.
I will give the book four stars out of five.
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