Counter-Currents
2,174 words
The Blues Brothers
Directed by John Landis
Starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd
1980
Occasionally there is domestic political violence in the United States. For example, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was a violent contest between ordinary Democrats and the New Left due to differences regarding the Vietnam War. The New Left and its hippie supporters were influenced by cultural forces already well in place before the election. Starting with the 2016 election and continuing until now, the “antifa” has carried out a great deal of political violence. Like the hippies and those elements of the New Left which had been involved in political violence in an earlier generation, the violent antifa is shaped by mainstream metapolitical culture. One mainstream cultural product which influenced the antifa can clearly be seen in the 1980 movie, set in Illinois, called The Blues Brothers.
This movie is a spinoff of a Saturday Night Live skit. Despite its comedic origins and many improbable scenes, The Blues Brothers has a serious message that the antifa has learned. Like antifa attacks on middle-class Americans, The Blues Brothers is partially an act of ethnic warfare. The movie was crafted by two Jews, producer Robert K. Weiss and director John Landis, who both have Illinois connections. Landis and Weiss use African-American music and “civil rights” culture against white Midwesterners. Specifically, they attack the two sides of Illinois’ native white culture. Often in movies, the villain is the one who says the truth, and the lead Illinois Nazi admits this during the film when he appeals to an angry mob of Illinois whites: “The Jew is using the black as muscle against you! And you are left there, helpless.”
The meme that it is okay and funny to punch a “Nazi” outside of a Second World War context appears in this comedy. Other anti-social behaviors of the antifa, like smelling bad and acting inappropriately in public settings, are exhibited by the Blues Brothers.
The Blues Brothers has a tremendous cultural influence. T-shirts such as the one above have been worn as “trendy” fashion for decades.
The Two Sides of Illinois
To explain it simply, the State of Illinois comprises two cultural elements. In the southern part of the state, centered on Carbondale (where Weiss graduated from college), the culture is aligned with Appalachia. The first settlers in southern Illinois mostly came from Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. This region is often called Little Egypt. As one travels north towards Chicago (where Landis was born), the culture becomes more aligned with the Puritan and Quaker industrial north. Indeed, the villages of northern Illinois look like New England hamlets, with an orderly cluster of houses surrounding a Congregationalist Church with a white steeple.
Perversion of the Good
All activists passionately pushing some cause on the street may have a point. Their passion might very well identify and fix the ills occurring in the here and now. However, antifa activism is a perversion of that good. They appear to be searching for justice, but cannot meet their enemy’s ideas with ideas of their own. Instead, they use invective and physically attack their foes. The antifa search for a justice that has no meaning or connection with reality. The Blues Brothers movie is the same perversion of the good.
On the surface, The Blues Brothers appears to be a story of redemption for low-level crooks as well as a rhythm-and-blues musical. However, this is really a perversion of the redemption story. The perverse nature of the film begins when Jake “Joliet” Blues (John Belushi) is getting released from prison and his property is being inventoried before being returned. Among his property is a soiled prophylactic condom. It is unnecessary to the story but is inserted to immediately soil the minds of the audience.
The movie then continues to connect Jake and Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) with their Christian roots, although in a perverse way. Jake has made a promise to visit the nun who runs the orphanage where they grew up after he was released from prison. The meeting with the orphanage’s head nun, Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman), sets the plot in motion. It turns out that the orphanage needs five thousand dollars to pay its back taxes. The local Catholic hierarchy doesn’t want to pay it and instead desires to close and sell the orphanage’s building.
The meeting with Sister Mary likewise soils the mind of the audience. One sees that Jake and Elwood are fundamentally unable to connect with the Western institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead of imbibing the church’s teachings, they have embarked on a life of crime. Additionally, Sister Mary is unable to treat her alumni as adults. They sit in the desks of schoolchildren, and Jake uses profanity when talking to her. White authority in the form of Sister Mary, who hits the Blues Brothers with her ruler, is shown as brutal and trite. Because the Blues Brothers are criminals, Sister Mary is depicted as disconnected from Divine Providence in that she uselessly “prayed so hard” for their non-existent redemption. Also, the intellectual innovations that have come out of Catholic monasteries (such as Mendelian inheritance) are replaced in this film with a nun swatting “cool kids” with a ruler.
Then the brothers go to the basement of the orphanage where they meet one of its employees, Curtis (Cab Calloway). Curtis is a cool-cat black man who uses salty language, and displays a painting of Martin Luther King, Jr. Curtis represents the new, post-“civil rights” religion of American society. It is cool, pro-integration, and likes black music.
On Curtis’ recommendation, the Blues Brothers attend church. They don’t attend a Catholic service filled with Chicago’s whites, but rather a black Protestant one. The Blues singer James Brown (1933-2006) plays the preacher, and he, the choir, and the congregation sing a typical R&B song. There is no real Christian message in the song, only a superficial emotionalism. During this service, Jake “sees the light.” They decide to get their old band back together and raise the five thousand dollars to keep the orphanage open. In this scene, we are told that divine revelation doesn’t occur in white Christianity, but only through an “authentic” black Christianity.
The perversion of the redemption story continues in the way in which the Blues Brothers get the five thousand dollars. Sister Mary insists she won’t accept stolen money. The two brothers get the money when they organize a concert, but in getting the band back together, they leave a trail of destruction. The money isn’t stolen, but it can hardly be called honestly gained. Additionally, a mysterious woman (Carrie Fisher) attempts to kill Jake with various sophisticated weapons. It turns out that this subplot is also a perversion of the good. Jake had left the woman at the altar. She is furious and is angry that she has been chaste, while he was only a deceptive philanderer. Jake gives a list of excuses why he wasn’t able to make it to the wedding, takes off his glasses, and his jilted bride-to-be temporarily puts aside her anger. Jake only exploits the respite to escape.
The Enemies of the Blues Brothers are the Enemies of the Antifa: The Police as Enemy . . . and Friend
The Blues Brothers have a run-in with the police that sets off the campy chase that runs throughout the movie. There is also a strange relationship between the Blues Brothers and the police. In one scene, the Illinois State Police chase the Blues Brothers through the mall, but in another scene a helpful local police officer tells them what’s causing a traffic jam.
Local Cop: “The bums won their court case, so they are marching today.”
Jake: “What bums?”
Local Cop: “Fucking Nazi Party.”
The police are thus the enemy and a helper at the same time. This is very much the relationship between the antifa and the police in real life. In some cases, the police hang back, do nothing, and let the antifa carry out a Blues Brothers-style orgy of arson and vandalism. In other cases, the police put a stop their activities with little trouble. The antifa are an expression of a faction of the political power structure, so the state, the courts, and such are not always a full-on enemy.
The Other Enemies: Nazis and Good Old Boys
The Blues Brothers also have two other enemies. Unlike the ambivalent relationship the brothers have with the police, these enemies are implacable with the antifa. Additionally, there is a sense throughout the movie that the villains are also enemies of the Jews. The first enemy is cartoonish Nazis, whose leader is played by Henry Gibson (1935-2009). The antifa’s entire worldview is one where they think everyone they are fighting – police, Republicans, or the National Guard – are Nazis. However, there is more to this. It is well-known that Jews also view their enemies, no matter how trivial, as “Nazis.” In this movie, the Jewish director and producer may feel that the Nazis aren’t really all that different from the people of Chicago and its suburbs. The Nazis (Jake specifically calls them “Illinois Nazis”) represent the native, Puritan, and Quaker aspect of northern Illinois. When the leader of the Nazis addresses the Illinois mob, he states, “You are going to join with us.”
Other scenes featuring the Nazis show that the Nazis aren’t that far from power. They are implied to have contacts throughout the Illinois government. They have also won a court case and are allowed to march, clogging traffic. As the movie plays out, eventually the Nazis are chasing the Blues Brothers alongside the police.
The second enemy of the Blues Brothers is a rural, white American country music band called The Good Old Boys, who are led by Tucker McElroy (Charles Napier). As mentioned above, southern Illinois is more Appalachia than the orderly north represented by the Nazis, so The Good Old Boys are emblematical of Little Egypt. The Blue Brothers earn the ire of The Good Old Boys when they play a concert in the Boys’ stead. The Blues Brothers pocket the concert money, but are told that they have already drunk more beer than the value of the concert’s proceeds. The band makes a run for it, thus ripping off The Good Old Boys and the venue’s owner.
It is as though the Jewish production team of Weiss and Landis see both aspects of Illinois culture as equally alien and hostile. From their point of view, they may have a logical point. Most American resistance to Jewish influence in America has a Yankee, New England feel. For example, Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant were Yankees, and George Lincoln Rockwell’s ancestors were the founders of Connecticut. Even the abolitionist Yankee William Lloyd Garrison was hostile to Jewish influence. Additionally, the Quakers are one of the few Protestant religious denominations which express sympathy for the Palestinians. In reality, rural southern Illinois has far more Evangelical Protestants who are sympathetic to Jews and Israel, but this feeling of sympathy is not returned.
Even with all the happy music and the so-called “mission from God,” The Blues Brothers is a movie which is deeply hostile to Illinois whites. The depiction of the Blues Brothers defrauding The Good Old Boys and nearly running over the Nazis in their car is a metapolitical green light to destroy those who one disagrees with.
The flaws of this movement are also covered up by the magic of the screenwriter. In spite of their reckless and aggressive driving, the selfish Blues Brothers don’t seem to ever run over or kill anyone during their car chases. The negative ramifications of the Great Migration that brought blacks from rural Mississippi to Chicago are not shown. We are shown a world-class singing black preacher, but none of the crime, blight, ghetto, and so forth that really oppressed the pre-gentrification Chicago of the 1980s. The music instantly wins over the crowds of ordinary people. Indeed, the concert at the climax of the film comes together in a magical way. For example, Curtis is able to warm up the audience with the Cab Calloway song, “Minnie the Moocher.”[1] The band, and Curtis, instantly transforms from T-shirts and jeans to a well-dressed group in a 1940s, big band-style setting. It’s a miracle! It is very likely that a member of the antifa who smashes windows genuinely thinks he is as cool as the Blues Brothers. They can mouth off to authority with impunity, are down with the blacks in their own mind, can win over the crowd with a song, and are on a mission from God, protected by miracles.
Notes
1. Watching Cab Calloway sing “Minnie the Moocher” several decades after the release of The Blues Brothers, I was struck by how much Cab Calloway’s music seems to be more like the minstrel shows of old, rather than cutting-edge musical fashion. I suspect that all black music, from the Obama era’s fashionable Hamilton to Gangsta Rap will eventually be seen as more like old-time minstrel shows rather than anything actually noble.
8 comments
Our people are easily fooled by the surface of things. Anything can be made fashionable if enough money is thrown at it. On a small scale, I remember as a teenager watching bemused as other teenagers rushed to be seen at a trendy new night club, when all I saw was a grimy, dirty building painted black on the inside and run by a paunchy, sleazy middle-aged Pakistani with connections to the criminal underworld. Many of the world’s voguish restaurants supposedly run by modish Michelin-starred chefs are really actually run by very unfashionable shady Jewish ‘businessmen’. Drugs, prostitution, pornography, money-lending and slum-landlording all provide the money to create a more respectable facade in order to more easily brainwash and dupe our people out of their hard-earned money, their culture, their country and their souls. Our people’s natural leaders often give way to despair at the seemingly impossible task we face, but truth is all powerful, and the phrase in this article ‘The movie was crafted by two Jews, producer Robert K. Weiss and director John Landis’ cuts through the semitic Gordian knot in seconds.
Funny that you should bring this up. Every now and then I think of the “Illinois Nazi” scene in The Blues Brothers, which ends with Sturmabteilung Gibson dumped in the drink. It’s a common enough theme in movies: people whom liberals hate are to be physically assaulted. Here it was in a comic fashion. Elsewhere it is not.
Look at the original Manchurian Candidate (1962), which ends with Laurence Harvey assassinating a Joe McCarthy-like Senator (James Gregory). The message is clear: those whom liberals hate must die. Within the context of the movie, killing a senator is a good thing because all goodthinkers know that McCarthy was a madman and thus must be put down. (And it is a fitting commentary on liberal slogans about “tolerance” that they show zero tolerance to their own enemies.)
Consider the ending to Giant (1956) where Rock Hudson assaults a roadhouse proprietor because of his refusal to serve minorities. Never mind that the proprietor’s refusal was within both law and custom for the time and place. He violated liberal taboos and thus violence is justified against him and his establishment.
Yet another example: J.W. Pepper, the archetypal Southern Sheriff in two Bond fliks: Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). In the first, the Sheriff is something of a comic figure, though shown to be a determined lawman. In the second, he must pay for his (horrors!) bigotry by being dunked and then hauled off by Thai police to an uncertain fate. Perhaps the producers believed the first movie portrayed Southern lawmen a little too positively, and thus Pepper delenda est.
Another theme is that blacks must do the dirty work for liberals who lack the guts to take up arms. Way back when I still had a television set, I saw a drama in which a black detective goes to a bar where American “Nazis” hang out and drink beer under a big swastika Reichsbanner (did any such places actually exist in the latter 20th century?). Of course, the scene ends with the black beating up the entire Nazi crew. That’s the big liberal fantasy, of course.
Movies like Django Unchained (2013) and the new Birth of a Nation (2016) are not just historical dramas but instead calls to action for blacks to assault Whites today. The theme is that violence is justifiable when the target is identified as “racist.” We see this playing out in the violence perpetrated by blacks and/or leftists in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Berkeley, New Orleans, and not to mention Johannesburg, Calais, Malmo, London and Cologne. You have to ask, how much of this realworld violence is the result of decades of media agitprop advocating blacks attacking Whites?
Never mind that Whites abolished slavery a century and a half ago, never mind that the entire civil rights agenda has been implemented, never mind that in the 21st century it is Africans and Middle Easterners who are bringing back slavery from Sudan to Rotherham to the Islamic State.
The enemy on the telescreens must be White.
Are there movies showing the protagonists assaulting communists in a peacetime environment? The only one I can think of offhand is Big Jim McLain, made way back in 1952 with John Wayne as a HUAC investigator on the trail of the Communist Party USA in Hawaii. There’s one fistfight, but it’s in there mainly to give a little action to a slightly boring procedural.
This is all the more interesting given the long march of leftist violence as well as perfidy in America: terrorism by the Weathermen, treason by the atom bomb spies, the ongoing BLM pillage and arson roadshow, the current crop of antifa havoc. We might also note the systemic discrimination against White people from affirmative action to flashmob attacks. But do we see movies in which righteous rightists justifiably assault leftists and perhaps dump a campus “diversity” commissar in the drink?
Perhaps some enterprising nationalist film maker could produce just such a movie.
It might just start something with little more than a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, and a couple pairs of sunglasses.
Most everything is an act of ethnic warfare against whites. A few months ago they were showing a preview of a movie in which a white girl takes her black boyfriend home to meet her family. Horrors of horror the white family has an operating table in a back room, and they are out to make him behave like a white man (at least that’s what I got out of the preview). I came to the conclusion that this was the theme when the black boyfriend tries to fist bump a previous black victim who wants to shake his hand. I predict that the jews will replace the traditional European handshake with the fist bump (you see it all the time on the tv now). I predict that the traditional European greetings will be replaced with “Hey Mutherfucker, and Hey Dawg.” If you have any sensitivity of soul these greetings will disturb you, until you learn to ignore it. Oh, this great degenerate, negrified, judiazed, hog wallow we live it (my apologies to hogs, they would never allow what has happened to the white people to happen to them).
It would have been valuable to include quotes from like-minded pro-White critics circa the film’s release. The most daunting, maddening obstacle white Millennials face, in regard to “American pop culture,” is access, hell, even awareness of, a backlog of pro-White, Jew-wise POVs. Without knowledge of the JQ, ‘The Blues Brothers’ is a loud, self-congratulatory Boomer relic with a bygone comedian. Fedoras are now a meme synonymous with cringe.
Luckily, the PC march has been unkind to ‘The Blue Brothers.’ (And to a lesser extent, Landis’s ‘Animal House,’ a work of degenerate radioactivity still warping our college campuses). Liberals take issue with Belushi and Ackroyd’s appropriation of black culture, both the characters’ and the actors’, whom made countless millions. That’s tragic irony. For most Millennials, the film is insensitive not for its portrayals of whites/Catholics, but for its exploitation of blacks. Here again lies a missed opportunity for both sides to corner the Hollywood Jews. The internet is finally making headway.
John Landis was famously blacklisted by Jews, namely Spielberg, for ‘The Twilight Zone’ set decapitations. How twisted is it that Landis directed Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” with its occult zombie celebratory shuffle, less than a year after the disaster? Jackson himself seemed to get redpilled upon connecting the video’s Christian-led controversy to Landis’s darker agenda. He even apologized for making it. And later used “kike me” in a song about (((them))) “not caring about [blacks].”
Was John Belushi similarly getting redpilled before his death? How could he not. Gentile actors don’t realize they’re in a rat cage until their youth declines. Then they see the fang marks and feel woozy. The energetic rebellion of youth is feasted upon by (((them))) until it’s inseparable from their Rebellion against us. One of the last people to see Belushi alive was Robin Williams, they made a drug trade. After Belushi’s death, Dan Aykroyd was never the same. He’s a UFO nut now. Robin Williams killed himself before starring in ‘Mrs Doubtfire 2.’ Don’t doubt (((fire))), lads.
In the actual and figurative sense, one dead far too soon, one forever shaken, the Blues Brothers became the blue brothers. And a quick search tells me John Landis’ gay son is currently be the biggest movie writer in Hollywood. Really makes you think.
“John Landis was famously blacklisted by Jews, namely Spielberg, for ‘The Twilight Zone’ set decapitations.” It would be an overstatement to say that Landis was blacklisted by Jews in the sense that his career was killed, but it would be no surprise if he was shunned by many in the film industry. I looked up the subject, and wasn’t surprised to read this in Wikipedia’s entry titled “Twilight Zone accident”:
“The film featured four sequences, one of which was based on a 1961 Twilight Zone episode, ‘A Quality of Mercy.’ In the script, character Bill Connor (Morrow) [an obvious reference to the segregationist Bull Connor] is a bigot who travels back in time to suffer through various eras of persecution, such as Nazi-occupied Europe and the racial segregation of the American South during the mid-20th century. He then finds himself in the midst of the Vietnam War, where he decides to protect some Vietnamese children from American troops.”
In short, typically Jewish, anti-White propaganda. This particular piece of propaganda uses the argument “how would you like it if you were a [fill in blank]?” — an argument that appeals to sentiment rather than logic.
As I stated, Spielberg quietly blacklisted Landis, for 1) tarnishing Spielberg’s public image by association (Spielberg spearheaded the movie), and kiboshing a potential ‘TZ’ film franchise 2) doing a terrible, borderline sociopathic job at concealing his DGAF attitude re: negligent, gruesome on-set deaths 3) a Jewish sense of vengeance — see what happened to Bernie Madoff, who stole shekels from Spielberg and other power members of his own (((tribe))).
Jews blacklisting their own is a different beast. It’s not documented by the press or Wikipedia. Landis’s son has frequently overshared what happened to his dad, due to Spielberg’s whisper campaign. Ironically, it’s sort of like the nun’s treatment of the Blues Brothers.
This particular piece of propaganda uses the argument “how would you like it if you were a [fill in blank]?”
Here’s an idea for another enterprising nationalist film maker: turn the theme of the TZ movie around.
How about a liberal movie director finds himself having to experience these situations:
* A South African farmer under attack by ANC minions.
* A Ukrainian khulak being starved out by Bolshevik commissars.
* A white fraternity bro’ falsely accused of rape by a demented black feminist.
* A parent in Rotherham experiencing a Kafkaesque bureaucracy as he tries to save his daughter from sexual enslavement.
* A conservative speaker at UC Berkeley assaulted by antifa…only to have the crew from The Right Stuff charge in to his rescue!
Pass the popcorn!
Holy shit, just read the comments on your “essay” and wow…like you dudes are really over “thinking” this shit.
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