Nguyen Van Thanh, now in his nineties and living in France, is one of 20,000 Indochinese workers who were requisitioned by force to work in France during the Second World War. As Doan Bui points out: ‘Nguyen Van Thanh was not considered a citizen. He was an indigenous person’ (2012: 50). Nguyen's status, and that of so many others like him during the Second World War, goes to the heart of the situation described by Arendt, namely, that those not inducted as citizens into a political community cannot hope to be the beneficiaries of human rights. The colonial nations' policy in this regard is very clear: only some (and these are obviously not those who are subjected to colonial rule) can be included in the domain that Arendt also calls the realm of freedom. Previously, we have also pointed out that those still deemed to be mired in necessity cannot be said to be free. At best, they might eventually become free, but this is in no way guaranteed, as Arendt's references to the lives of ‘savages’ clearly indicates. What Arendt says here runs deep in the European tradition of political thought, balanced as it is on the coordinates of necessity and freedom.