Correction: Questions About the Legality of the Power Transfer in Myanmar

As most readers are hopefully aware, I go through excruciating pains to ensure that everything printed on this site is accurate. Aside from things that are clearly satirical, everything that I state as factual I guarantee is factual, and if it turns out it is not, I will issue a correction.

Obviously, the site also includes a lot of speculation, but there is a big difference between saying “X is true” and “in my opinion, based on the information I have, I think X is probably true.”

More and more, I’m posting speculation, given that we are able to find less and less information about what is going on. However, I want to maintain a policy that every time I say “X is true,” there are significant sources to back that up.

This is a minor correction, as I made a statement of fact regarding something that is actually disputed.

On Wednesday, I wrote that the Constitution of Myanmar allowed for the military to declare a state of emergency. There are legal questions as to whether that is true, but it certainly is not cut and dry.

However, a reader responded with this:

Wrong. Please stop repeating this.

The constitution allows the military to take power for 1 year if a state of emergency is declared.
The power to declare a state of emergency lies solely with the elected President.

President U Win Myint told the Tatmadaw they will have to shoot him and they can go fuck themselves because he isnt signing shit.

You can argue the semantics that the military seizing politicians is de facto a state of emergency, whether the President declares it or not, but the fact remains that the Tatmadaw did NOT take power legally within the constitution. This was a coup.

In actual fact, there is currently some debate about this matter.

The Wikipedia page on the event has an entire paragraph, containing 5 sources, discussing whether or not what the military did was allowed by the Constitution:

The legality of the coup has been questioned by legal scholars, including Melissa Crouch. The NLD has also rejected the legal basis for the military takeover. During its announcement of the coup, the military invoked Articles 417 and 418 of the 2008 Constitution as the legal basis for the military takeover. However, Article 417 of the Constitution authorises only a sitting president to declare a state of emergency, following consultation with the National Defence and Security Council (NDSC). The declaration of a state of emergency then transfers legislative, executive, and judicial power to the Commander-in-Chief per Article 418. Half of the NDSC’s members at the time of the coup were civilians, including the president, the civilian-elected second vice-president, and the speakers of the upper and lower house. The military claims that the NDSC was convened, chaired by Aung Min Hlaing, to invoke Articles 417 and 418. However, this session was held in the absence of the civilian members of the NDSC, and it is unclear whether the military had the constitutional authority to unilaterally declare a state of emergency, since the Constitution grants the president, who at the time had not voluntarily vacated his role, the sole authority to declare a state of emergency.

Note that currently, the president is being held by the military, and is refusing to sign anything.

These are the actual cited articles from the Constitution:

The military’s response would be this:

1. The article states that the president has to consult the NDSC before declaring the emergency, meaning that the actual authority comes from the NDSC, and the president is simply the one signing the papers because he is the head of state, and
2. It was impossible for the president hold the responsibility of signing the declaration, given that the emergency was declared due to election fraud, which the president was implicated as being involved in

Furthermore, the military installed the vice president as president, and after being installed as president, he signed the papers declaring a state of emergency. But obviously, the vice president is not mentioned in those articles.

What I don’t know is if there are provisions in the Constitution for the president to be removed and replaced with the vice president if the former is considered incapable of carrying out his duties, such as in the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution that the Justice Department tried to use to replace Donald Trump with Mike Pence. If such a provision exists, then this would all be legal. However, although I did not read the entire 130-page constitution and I am not a legal scholar anyway, the only thing I could find with regards to removing the president and/or vice president involved 2/3rds votes of the parliament.

However, while that might be a valid argument legally, and legal scholars outside of Myanmar are currently discussing it, it is less than definitive, and I said in a definitive way that the Constitution allows this, it was an oversimplification.

Thus, I am officially correcting the statement.

It may not seem important enough of an issue to issue this 800 word correction, but I want it to be clear that I take my responsibility to the facts very seriously. This is a reminder of how seriously I take that responsibly. The last time this happened was almost a year ago, and I issued a correction like this and fired the person who made the mistake.

You can always count on the Daily Stormer to tell the facts. There are always going to be little mistakes now and again, but we will always correct them promptly, as we’ve done here.

Whatever the Case

I retract the previous statements, given these questions about the legality of the power seizure by the military.

That said, I continue to hold the positions that:

1. It is not any of America’s business.
2. Democracy is garbage, and the nation of Myanmar is better off with the military in charge while they are dealing with their crisis of illegal Islamic immigration from Bangladesh, the uprising in neighboring Thailand, as well as the more general crises of the region and the world.

Furthermore: what Myanmar’s military did was a lot more valid that what Joe Biden did, both by stealing the election and by implementing martial law without any declaration.

We literally have the Capitol surrounded by military, and the government hasn’t even given an explanation as to why they are there. Myanmar has a bunch of stuff going on, and a good reason to declare martial law, whether or not this is technically a “coup.”