Anderson Cooper compares Jan. 6th to genocide

CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper compares the insurrection on January 6^th to Rwandan and Bosnia genocides. While discussing impeachment with a guest on his show Cooper stated, “We’ve seen it in Bosnia, we’ve seen it in Rwanda where radio was telling people the, you know, Hutus were telling the radio listeners that Tutsi were cockroaches for, you know, getting them ginned up for genocide.” Videos of Trump supporters breaching the Capitol building was playing while discussing the genocide.

While talking to Representative Adam Kinzinger on his show “Anderson Cooper 360,” Cooper compared the insurrection to incidents of mass genocide in other countries.

“You know, part of it I think just based on part of what you were just saying comes to mind the idea of ‘otherizing’ people is something I think we saw a lot of over the last four years. I mean something we’ve seen a lot of over the last decades, but it’s so easy to ‘otherize’ people. To make people ‘other than,’ ‘other than’ American, ‘other than’ patriotic, ‘other than’ human, you know.”

Cooper continues comparing the events on January 6^th to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.

“We’ve seen it in Bosnia, we’ve seen it in Rwanda where radio was telling people the, you know, Hutus were telling the radio listeners that Tutsi were cockroaches for, you know, getting them ginned up for genocide.”

“And you see it in these videos, where people who claim they are patriots are in the face of a police officer calling him, you know, as we’re seeing it right there.” Video of January 6^th is playing while Cooper is making these comparisons.

Cooper has compared the insurrection to mass genocides before with a separate guest on his show. On January 12^th Cooper discussed how he witnessed the Rwandan genocide.

“You know I remember sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Egypt in the midst of the revolution and it was a really scary day. I was, I’ve seen a lot, and I was very scared that day. You’ve been to a lot of civil wars, you know I was in Rwanda in the genocide briefly, I was in Bosnia, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan.”

“You’ve been around the world you’ve seen a lot. I hear people talking about civil war in America as if they know what they’re talking about, as if they know what that looks like. And unless you’ve seen it up close, I mean, it is a horrible, horrible thing. I am so upset when I hear these people at rallies, at Trump rallies talking about civil war like it’s some sort of cleansing.”

The Rwandan genocide that started in 1994 had finally reached a boiling point between the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s. A plane crash that killed Presidents of Burundi and Rwanda had sparked the beginning of the genocide that killed one million people and left 250,000 women raped.

The insurrection that occurred on January 6^th left five people dead. Cooper did not mention the death and destruction caused by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.