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Imagine, there is a social group, which I think is so evil they have to be banished or exterminated.

For example:

Freedom Party of Austria represents not fully exterminated Nazi scum and their sympathizers

The word I'm looking for should emphasize that I want the Nazis to be exterminated, and - sadly - many of them were not.

How do I say this in English?

In Russian we have the adjective недобитый (when someone was beaten, but not strong enough and/or was injured, but not killed). I'm looking for something similar in English.

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    The verb exterminate, when used with regard to humans, is associated by many (most) speakers of English with exactly the kind of thinking that certain Nazi scum used. It refers to killing people without any respect for humanity. So unless you want to achieve a morbid kind of irony, I would advise not to use that word.
    – oerkelens
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 16:35
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    I agree with Oerkelens. What you want exterminated is a set of opinions, not a group of people. Try something like "Freedom Party of Austria represents the unfortunate persistence of the reprehensible views of the Nazi party and their sympathizers."
    – ab2
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 17:17
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    Comrade! Your views on the extermination of the enemies of the people have been noted, and your name has been forwarded with favor to the Central Committee.
    – deadrat
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 17:38
  • A very bad idea to use an idiom of that sort.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 18:31
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    In order to be fair, it should be mentioned that this might be the effect he wants with this particular sentence, especially with the offensive language tag. After-all, World War II was not a nice negotiation over tea and crumpets between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, it was a bloodbath. It seems as if the figurative concept is that the compared kind of thinking should have died with the Nazis that were indeed being exterminated. I suggest changing fully to completely and not to the failure.
    – Tonepoet
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 18:33

8 Answers 8

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...not fully eradicated

verb
destroy completely; put an end to.

Might be preferable: It's a little less murderous and evil than exterminate; It leaves room to be interpreted as simply the destruction of the ideology.

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  • +1. Or one could say "uprooted".
    – TimR
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 19:43
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    Barely better than "exterminated".
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Dec 7, 2015 at 20:39
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You could use the synonym extirpate without rewording the sentence.

extirpate -

1. to remove or destroy totally; do away with

2. to pull up by or as if by the roots; root up:

The problem is that exterminate is too literal when discussing a group of people. It means kill. Extirpate, which derives from destroying plants, would be clearly the more figurative sense of the word, meaning "root out."

Note that the example sentence, "France can’t extirpate the political malady with legislation any more than Germany can cleanse its past by banning movies," in the sidebar here is specifically referring to extirpating malign political influence of the sort you are discussing.

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  • It doesn't just mean kill, it means kill 'em all. Still not what the OP wants.
    – user867
    Commented Dec 7, 2015 at 23:44
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Apart from the value judgement implicit in "unfortunately", surviving or survivors would do. So the example sentence would become "Freedom Party of Austria represents surviving Nazi scum and their sympathizers." The use of "Nazi scum" pretty clearly suggests where the speaker stands on the issue of survival.

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"Expunge Nazism" If Nazism can be expunged as a force, would you let a few crazies live and mumble among themselves? How about: "Freedom Party of Austria represents the resurgent ideas of Nazi scum and their sympathizers; Nazism must be expunged from our political life." Resurgent: "That rises again from death, torpor...." Expunge: "To blot out" Webster's New Collegiate.

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You don't want to express what you think you do in this case.

The word exterminate refers to actions such as what the Nazis themselves did: mass murder of an entire group of people, completely disregarding the individuality of those people.

The only groups worthy of extermination are:

  • Fictional groups that are inherently evil, such as (in Tolkein's
    Legendarium) Orcs, Trolls, Balrogs, and Dragons. No real-life group of people has this property.
  • Depending on your views, certain groups of people defined by the horrific crimes they have committed, such as war criminals and serial killers.
  • Diseases such as ebola, smallpox, and HIV.

There may be other groups, but they all involve ideas, things, or pests, not people.

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I think you should be saying something like

Freedom Party of Austria represents Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who continue to persist in their beliefs in spite of the fact that Nazism has been totally discredited.

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How about "dregs" or "rump"? The dregs are the unpalatable bits left at the bottom of a drink, and "rump" in this case means the small or unimportant remnant of something larger, as in "he was left to run the rump of the company after the mass layoffs".

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decimated
kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of, e.g. Cholera decimated the population.

Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a population. In our 2005 survey, 81 percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence ‘The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war’, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. This is an increase from the 66 percent who accepted this sentence in our 1988 survey. TFD

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