Coincidance - Principia Discordia

176 COINCIDANCE
emotionally, to use the name of John MacBride in a crucial, rhyming
position in this stanza; for Major MacBride had the fortune to marry the
woman Yeats loved, Maud Gonne. Isn't it strange how all things relate to all
other things? Yeats once tried to persuade Maud Gonne to join the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and she refused, distrusting all
Freemasonic groups equally; yet the Golden Dawn has more to do with the
publication of this anthology at this time than most readers will guess.
The following article is a conversation with Sean MacBride, who is the
son of Major MacBride and Maud Gonne, and also one of the most canny
Elder Statesmen in Europe. In a few pages, I shall list some of the honors,
including the Nobel prize, that Sean MacBride has won; these are of interest
as documentation of the high regard in which he is held in Europe. It is, to
me, extremely curious that this book represents the first publication in the
United States of this conversation with a major European politician and
intellectual. The magazine which originally commissioned this interview,
New Age, suddenly decided not to publish it (although they paid me a
generous "kill" fee for my time and effort). Other leading U.S. magazines,
including Playboy and Penthouse, also declined to publish it. It has appeared
thusfar only in a Swiss newspaper.
None of the political opinions expressed by Mr. MacBride are considered
at all "extreme" in Ireland or most of Europe. They are the normal attitudes
of normal statesman and philosophers in ordinary European nations. I
wonder why they seem so alien and weird to those whose view of the world
is based only on what they read in the American media?
At the age of 80, Sean MacBride, a former member of the Irish
Republican Army, is the best-known anti-nuclear activist in Europe, and as a
lawyer and founding member of Amnesty International has probably done
more than any man in history to secure the release of political prisoners all
over the world. Because of his non-partisan opposition to injustice wherever
it appears—an outgrowth of traditional Irish neutralism in the wars of the
Great Powers—MacBride is the only living human being to have received
both the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government (1977) and the
American Medal of Justice from the United States (1978). He has also
received the Nobel Peace Prize (1974), the International Institute of Human
Rights Medal (1974), the UNESCO Medal of Merit (1980) and the Dag
Hammerskjoeld Prize for International Solidarity (1981). And at the age
when most men have been retired for 15 years, Sean MacBride shows
absolutely no signs of slowing down.
When I first tried to contact him for an interview, MacBride was in New
York, testifying at an extradition hearing. Before we could meet, he stopped