Anderson Cooper Compares Capitol Protests to Rwandan Genocide

Anderson Cooper Compares Capitol Protests to Rwandan Genocide

By Movieguide® Staff

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper recently compared the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol protesters and their ideologies to the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide and the language they used to justify the massacre of their fellow countrymen 1994.

Cooper drew a correlation between the rhetoric that led to the horrific genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, by blaming former President Donald Trump and his supporters’ of “otherizing” certain people groups in America.

“Part of it, I think, just based on what you were just saying, it comes to mind, the idea of otherizing people is something I think we saw a lot of over the last four years,” Cooper said. “I mean, certainly we’ve seen a lot 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, and we’ve seen it in Bosnia, we’ve seen it in Rwanda, where radio was telling people that, you know, Hutus were telling the radio listeners that Tutsi were cockroaches for, you know, getting them gunned up for genocide,” the CNN anchor continued.

Anderson Cooper also said this back on Jan. 12: "I was in Rwanda in the genocide….I hear people talking about civil war in America….I am so upset when I hear these people at rallies — Trump rallies talking about Civil War as if it's some sort of a cleansing." pic.twitter.com/y9U9OH6cv6

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 10, 2021

In 1994, members of the Hutu majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda killed at least 800,000 people and targeted the Tutsi minority. In Bosnia, Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in 1995, which was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.

The protests earlier this year is absolutely incomparable to these travesties.

Not only are Cooper’s comments a gross mischaracterization of the protest on January 6, the irony of his words cannot be ignored.

Right now, many people on the left are calling for “deprogramming” of Trump supporters, who were previously referred to by some political candidates and commentators as “Deplorables.”

If the Left, mainstream media, and big tech continue to silence conservative voices, they create a dangerous path that endorses irreconcilable division. This promotes the “otherizing” Cooper warned against.

However, mutual respect for ideas, open discussions and unbiased media coverage will allow the United States to continue to flourish and protect it from mass violence.