thanatocracy

Noun

thanatocracy (plural thanatocracies)

1. Nominal governance by a dead person, through posthumous holding of an official position of authority, or by popular veneration and lasting influence of a personal ideology; necrocracy.
   • Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still “eternally” held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a...2001 January, Christopher Hitchens, “Visit to a Small Planet”, in Vanity Fair

   Synonyms:

   necrocracy

2. The carrying out of mass and organized killing as an official policy of a state.
   • Whatever the uncertainty as to what precisely lead Germany to genocide and to the creation of a literal thanatocracy in occupied Europe, it is clear that an ethical and valuational failure of great magnitude occurred.1988, Warren K. Thompson, “Ethics, Evil, and the Final Solution”, in Alan Rosenberg, Gerald E. Meyers, editors, Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, Temple University...
3. The enactment of policies held to lead, directly or indirectly, to death or an increased risk of death.
   • Kwitny's account of the medical gridlock that has paralyzed Washington during the Bush and Reagan Administrations provides a bleak picture of the indecisiveness and passivity of federal officials, whom many gay activists have described as the bureaucratic instruments of nothing less than a...1992 November 1, Daniel Harris, “The AIDS Guerrillas : ACCEPTABLE RISKS, By Jonathan Kwitny (Poseidon: $24; 384 pp.)”, in Los Angeles Times
4. A culture in which rituals relating to the dead play a unique or important role.
   • Exodus from Egypt means a departure from the thanatocracy where all our energies are expended on building the tombs of mummified eternal death.1978, Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Rich Nations/ Poor Nations: Towards a Just World Order in the Era of Neo-Colonialism", in Christian Spirituality in the United States: Independence and...
5. (figuratively) Endemic stagnation or decay.
   • […] if it neglects to maintain the physical plant which is decaying visibly and shockingly around us while refusing to upgrade the indispensable resources of teaching and learning — textbooks, encyclopedias, atlases, journals, scientific apparatus, that is, libraries and laboratories — then it is...2000, David Solway, The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods: Liberal Studies in the Corporate Age, McGill's-Queen's University Press, →ISBN, page 16