A new fanfic - 'The Bureaucrat'

[easleyweasley]

Set in the

Comments

An excellent if disturbing tale

[siaru]

One of the things which attracted me to your writing was your knowledgeable handling of the bureaucrats, Arbuthnot in particular, showing them not as creatures of the underworld but as mere people caught up in trying to make this human-society thing work. This tale, depicting as it does Life During Wartime, is another illumination of that.

Has this been posted to FictionAlley? It should be. You should also be posting to someplace like ficwad.com (DrT's stuff s posted over there) so as to widen your audience beyond just the FictionAlley afficionados. This cautionary tale, in particular, should be more widely read. Given the current state of the US and UK, where the War On Drugs is revealed to be the War To Colonize/Monopolize Drugs, with the War On Terror following in goosestep... this story could be regarded as a basic how-to for those who value freedom but see no means within their grasp for helping the effort to restore it.

Re: An excellent if disturbing tale

[easleyweasley]

My 'knowledge of bureaucrats', if you like, dates from time when I was reading Government files from in the 1950s in the Public Record Office at Kew. Ministers come and ministers go, but the officials stay - and it is the officials who write the policy options for new ministers. And I don't know whether you've ever seen the TV series, 'Yes, Minister' - but there is some truth in that too!

I posted it at FA a month or two ago - perhaps I should try some other sites too.

[bookish327]

I concur concerning "an excellent if disturbing tale." It brought to mind SCHINDLER'S LIST in a way. I had never thought about the life of the bureaucrats during the events of DH. Great writing and characterization. I felt like I knew this man personally.

[easleyweasley]

What does go on in the Ministry? We see something of it from Percy and GoF [although that is obviously intended as something of a caricature), then more onimously in OotP. Then we get Umbridge and the Commission in DH (I'm not entirely convinced by DH). But it takes more than one person to run a ministry. Yes, the Nazi analogies are there, as they were in DH. So who were the men and women who 'made the trains run on time'?

[fpb]

Just one point. The Nazis did not often use the same men who had been in the Ministries before them. To begin with, of course, the German bureaucracy had come down unchanged from the days of Kaiser Wilhelm and was very reactionary indeed. But even that was not enough for the Nazis: it is calculated that, in the months that followed Hitler's rise to the chancellorship, two million jobs changed hands. The Nazi Party had always been a shadow state in training, with each office and branch shadowing some part of the administration, and when the time came they had plenty of hungry young careerists ready to take over. For that matter, the most important part of any revolution is always the remaking of offices.

[easleyweasley]

Yes, I can quite see the point about rewarding your followers with jobs. Whether they'll be up to the job is another matter - one of the themes that I've tried exploring