…as it is in the alternative-history superhero graphic novel Watchmen, and the new movie.
Vietnam now has 86.1 million people. It’s the 13th most populous country in the world. It’s almost 2 1/2 times bigger than California, the biggest actual U.S. state; it’s even more populous than the top three states (California, Texas and New York) put together. Its GDP is well below that of the U.S. now, not surprisingly, but I think we can assume that U.S. statehood would lead over time to an improvement in GDP, and perhaps even a drop in the birthrate.
How would having a state so big and so distant change American democracy, if at all? Would it be a good thing for America? How would it change our dealings with rising powers like China and India?
Make any reasonable assumptions you like about the pluses or minuses of statehood, or of the difference a 20-year-long Nixon Administration (as in Watchmen) would make as opposed to the U.S.'s actual change in administrations. And can you foresee any significant shifts in Vietnam’s status as a U.S. state between 1985, the year of the main action in Watchmen, and today?
I seriously doubt Vietnamese would ever consider themselves American, Vietnam would be a colonial possession and we’d lose it the same way all other colonial possessions were lost - the economic advantages just not being worth the hassle.
You don’t consider Alaska an actual state? Are you in the AIP?
Well I think one result is we’d need to maybe reconsider our name if we have pieces of Asia now too.
I think it’d prolly go a lot like Hong Kong, but more integrated. Vietnamese being Americans would have the rights to move between American states as would other Americans to move there.
It would prolly be very heavy in military bases, with China, and Russia so close in all.
Over time the populations would blend. Also it’d have some interesting results on religious demographics.
If you magically converted Vietnam into a US state tomorrow the first thing you’d notice would be a massive Vietnamese independence movement and likely a significant support for it in the rest of the USA. It’s just too far and too different to mesh well. In any case where an overseas dependency is sufficiently large and populous to be an independent state, it becomes one. Look at my country, Canada; it’s not nearly as different from the UK as Vietnam is from the USA but it still went independent.
I just can’t think of an equivalent example to even guess how things would go with the US having a really massively influential state that’s completely separate geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Yoiu’d be giving a huge amount of influence - by my count 1/4 of the House of Representatives and about 140 electoral votes - to people with few shared issues and concerns with the rest of the country.
If this is going to go anywhere, instead of being a series of disjointed claims without any foundations, you might want to set forth the actual “history” that occurs in Watchmen. Simply saying “Vietnam is a state” leaves too much for any poster to invent his own background and then we will have folks fighting from utterly different preconceptions without even realizing it.
In the novel, how did Vietnam become a state? What happened to the independence movement (or did Moore simply gloss over that, either cluelessly or as irrelevant to his story)? Is all of Vietnam a state, or only South Vietnam? Why was it admitted as a single state and not as multiple states? (Why would they agree to join the U.S. with their huge population while being limited to two Senators, yet either controlling a fifth of the House or being artificially constrained in that representation, as well?)
I don’t remember any reference to Vietnam being integrated as a US state. A US colony, sure, but can anyone confirm it became a state? The notion doesn’t make any sense, Vietnam wouldn’t become a state for the same reasons the Phillipines never became a state…are we going to make millions of brown people on the other side of the world American citizens?
As for how this happened, well, with Doctor Manhattan on our side we won the Vietnam War pretty handily. By the end they were lining up to personally surrender to him. Note that in the comics this is portrayed pretty brutally, with Doctor Manhattan striding through the battlefield disintegrating enemy soldiers in batch lots.
As for why they would agree, well, when your resistance movement has been utterly crushed by a godlike superbeing, you agree to whatever terms the winners dictate. All the people who would be the type who wouldn’t accept the deal are already dead.
Vietnam historically has been a lot like Ireland: restive population fighting off a series of foreign invaders. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I don’t recall them ever saying in the comic that Vietnam became a state, just that America had won the Vietnam War.
So count me in as someone who sees Vietnamese statehood to be extremely implausible. I think at best it would have been a commonwealth or protectorate, similar to the Philippines.
Yes, both the GN and the movie are quite specific: Vietnam becomes the 51st state to join the Union, not a U.S. commonwealth or territory (although I’d agree that would be slightly more plausible, if it happened at all, which is itself obviously very unlikely).
Agreed. I think it was just to show how complete the U.S. victory was, thanks to the near-godlike intervention of Dr. Manhattan, and as a partial explanation for the later repeal of the 22nd Amendment and President Nixon’s repeated reelection (the grateful and possibly tractable voters of Vietnam would be a big Electoral College shot in the arm for Nixon). It was also another weird way to show how different Watchmen world is from our own.
Still, it’s fun to speculate. tomndebb, Vietnam become a state presumably like any other, by Act of Congress. Nothing is said about the Vietnamese independence movement. It’s not specified whether all or part of Vietnam becomes a state, although I assume it was all of it, since Nixon was not one to take half-steps. If the Vietcong were going to be decisively defeated and Dr. Manhattan were not to have to return once the insurgency flared up again, I assume Dr. M. led the conquest of North Vietnam too.
I don’t know why it would be admitted as a single state and not as multiple states, or to be limited to two U.S. senators. It might’ve been to cushion the impact of Vietnam statehood on the partisan balance in the U.S. Senate (as Hawaii and Alaska, at the time strongly Republican and strongly Democratic, respectively, were admitted just a year apart). I wouldn’t be surprised if registered members of the Communist Party in the North would be denied the vote, so that the “loyal” Vietnamese of the South would have disproportionate influence in state politics.
If Vietnam is a state, then the Vietnamese can freely settle in the US. I imagine a large percentage would, particularly after getting their country vaporized by Dr. Manhattan. So, one change I can think of is that we’d see Vietnamese being used in a lot of places in the US, the way Spanish is currently used.
Is Dr. Manhattan supposed to be a good guy or a bad guy?
I’m sorry you didn’t like my answer. Yes, Doctor Manhattan is a character in a work of fiction. But that work of fiction is a conscious deconstruction of comic book tropes. What would it do to a person to gain or possess godlike powers? Superman is a good guy because the writers of his comic define him as a good guy, but if there was a real-life superbeing how could you tell if he was a good guy or a bad guy? By what you saw on TV?
It’s quite common to label characters in fictional works as heroes, villains, anti-heroes or villains with a heart or whatever. If you don’t like to do this, then fine, but my question is a perfectly valid one from a literary criticism standpoint.
And Moore et al. are explicitly rejecting that convention. Dr. Manhattan is in some ways a good guy and in some ways not. Kind of like pretty much everyone in the real world. That’s the point.
I agree. But Moore consciously set out to not do that in Watchmen. Asking if Doctor Manhattan is a good guy is like asking if Tom Hanks or Bill Gates or Neil Armstrong (or you or me) is a good guy. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, yet he vaporized a bunch of Vietnamese peasants. He keeps the Soviet nuclear arsenal at bay, yet what happens when he has a personal crisis and needs some “me time”?
I haven’t seen the movie, but this is one of the big themes of the book. If you have a guy who puts on a mask and goes out at night to beat up criminals, what kind of a person is that guy really going to be like?