The Kellogg-Briand Pact looked like wishful thinking, but its legal principle underpinned the Nuremberg Trials and continues to shape international law today. Meanwhile, the market women of Guinea remind us that ordinary people have always been braver than the official record tends to admit.
On 27 August 1928, fifteen nations gathered in Paris and signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, formally declaring that war was no longer an acceptable instrument of national policy. Sixty-one nations would eventually sign. Eleven years later, the Second World War began. The pact, you may notice, contained no enforcement mechanism whatsoever.
And yet. The pact remains in force today, and more importantly, it established the legal principle that individuals could be held criminally responsible for waging aggressive war. That principle underpinned the Nuremberg Trials. The document that failed to prevent the deadliest conflict in human history also provided the legal framework for prosecuting those who started it. History is rarely tidy, but it is occasionally ironic in a deeply satisfying way.
The Basketball Upset Nobody Saw Coming
On 27 August 2004, Argentina defeated the United States 89-81 in the Olympic basketball semifinals in Athens. Since NBA players became eligible in 1992, Team USA had been essentially unbeatable at the Olympics. Argentina’s win remains the only Olympic loss Team USA has suffered in that era. It is the sort of result that makes you wonder whether “inevitable” is ever quite the right word.
Mars, Closer Than It Had Been in Sixty Thousand Years
On 27 August 2003, Mars made its closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years, passing at just 55.76 million kilometres. You could see it with the naked eye. It was the kind of celestial event that briefly makes everyone feel simultaneously very small and enormously fortunate.
The Market Women Who Said No
On 27 August 1977, market women in Guinea rose in public revolt against Ahmed Sékou Touré’s price controls. Touré’s regime had a well-documented record of brutally suppressing dissent. The women went out anyway, in broad daylight, on one of the most audacious ordinary days you have probably never heard of.
All four of these stories land in today’s episode: the pact that tried to outlaw war, the basketball match nobody expected, the planet that came unusually close, and the women who decided a regime’s rules were simply not their concern. Ten minutes. Worth every one of them.