Letter to a Ukrainian Friend
By Jeffrey C. Isaac
Photo: “President Trump clashes with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy Meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, 2025.” Source: The White House. From Wikimedia Commons.
February 28, 2025
My friend,
Only hours ago I watched Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the President and Vice President of my country, publicly berate and attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of your country. It was perhaps the most shameful public event I have ever seen. And while I had no part in it, I am nonetheless ashamed. Because those two cruel bullies are duly elected leaders of my country, and they claim to speak and act for my country. And as a citizen, I must accept a share of political responsibility for the depths to which my country has fallen by placing those men of my country in a position to do what they are now doing to yours.
I’m sure it won’t make you feel any better to know that what Trump and Vance are now doing to Zelenskyy–and indirectly to you and yours– is what they are doing to the United States as a whole: attacking, with all deliberate speed and contempt, the very foundations of liberal democracy, and the social, economic, and foreign policies that have long sustained such a democracy, however imperfectly.
But while we Americans suffer, and worry, for our future, our country, unlike yours, has not been invaded. (And to be clear, while I welcome every opportunity to disparage Trump, and while I would love to call him an “invader,” he is very much an American, and he does what he does with an authority that derives from having received the support of over 77 million American voters. He is no invader, however predatory and malevolent he may be.)
Your country, on the other hand, was invaded, over three years ago, by Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime, and it is still under Russian attack. You have suffered the loss of loved ones in war—I know you have–and endured bomb alerts and drone attacks and other disruptions of your life and the lives of your children and neighbors. And today, “my” president sought to extort and to embarrass your country and to deprive it of a lifeline at a moment of real danger. And to do so with a maximum of the cruelty that is the hallmark of that malignant man.
As you know, this semester I’m teaching two seminars on Albert Camus. I chose these courses because, after years of focusing my teaching and writing exclusively on Trump’s many assaults on democracy and decency, I decided that I needed a reprieve. I needed to escape the present, and focus on the literature of a different time and place, and on an author whose works I truly enjoy reading. And, of course, as you suspected, such an escape has proven impossible. Every single essay, speech, play, short story, or novel of Camus’s that I am now teaching screams out with current relevance. And I have discovered that I cannot and I must not quiet the screams, just as I must not quiet myself. I must allow the material to scream, and to engage my students, and to provoke them.
Last week my undergraduate class discussed Albert Camus’s “Letters to a German Friend.”
Camus wrote those four letters between 1943 and 1944, while an active participant in the French Resistance and before the Liberation of Paris in August of 1944. Addressed to an imaginary German interlocutor, the letters offered a blistering critique of the German nation’s embrace of Nazism and a proud explanation of the justice of French resistance to occupation and to fascism. In exceptionally passionate and powerful prose, each letter develops a different theme. I thought of you when I re-read them last week before my class, and I discussed you and your country with my students.
Let me tell you a bit about these letters, and quote from them, because I think they will hearten you, and doing so, right now, heartens me.
Camus’s first letter centers on the difference between patriotism and the blind nationalism and celebration of conquest to which Germans had succumbed. “We are fighting,” Camus insists, “for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.” Then, as now, tyrants and their supporters confused ethno-national tribalism, and a macho cruelty, with a “love of country” that was in fact a narcissistic exaltation of violence.
Camus’s second letter follows through on the first, attacking a nihilistic worship of power, “where intelligence is ashamed of intelligence.” Then, as now, tyrants and their supporters exulted in the puerile unmasking of hypocrisy and regarded morality, with scorn, as a sign of weakness to be vanquished. Camus called out such nihilism: “What is truth, you used to ask? To be sure, but at least we know what falsehood is . . . What is spirit? We know its contrary, which is murder. What is man? There I stop you, for we know. Man is that force which ultimately cancels all tyrants and gods.”
Camus’s third letter takes aim at the Nazi exaltation of “fatherland” and its “blind and bloody overtones.” “You speak of Europe, but the difference is that for you Europe is a property . . . you think in terms of potential soldiers, granaries, industries brought to heel, intelligence under control.” While Germany seeks to conquer, Camus defends a conception of Europe as a home to cultural and geographic diversity, to values “that you cannot choke in blood,” and to a plurality of nations fated to coexist. As he reminds his readers, crassness and brutalism do not constitute “greatness.” They constitute barbarism.
In his fourth and final letter, Camus articulates the commitment to a chastened humanism, and a relative justice, for which he will soon become famous: “With your scornful smile you will ask me: what do you mean by saving man? And with all my being I shout to you that I mean not mutilating him and yet giving a chance to the justice than man alone can conceive.”
The letters are passionate and powerful. They are overwritten, and marked by a kind of patriotic fervor that did not come naturally to Camus, and that he would soon moderate, as he became first a proponent and then a harsh critic of the excesses of postwar retributive justice. All the same, his fervor is entirely understandable, for his country was under Nazi occupation, and the outcome of the war was uncertain, and when one is literally compelled by circumstance to fight, it is to be expected that one will do what one can to inspire a reasonable confidence in one’s fellows. And the struggle against fascism was no academic seminar. As Camus himself explained in the Preface to the 1948 Italian edition of the letters:
“They were written and published clandestinely during the Occupation. They had a purpose, which was to throw some light on the blind battle we were then waging and thereby to make our battle more effective . . . I should simply like to forestall a misunderstanding. When the author of these letters says ‘you,’ he means not ‘you Germans’ but ‘you Nazis.’ When he says ‘we,’ this signifies not always ‘we Frenchmen’ but sometimes ‘we free Europeans.’ I am contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemy attitudes.”
This is the spirit in which Camus wrote and acted, and one of the reasons why he is one of my heroes. And it is the spirit in which you and your fellow citizens are acting now.
Today it is “Russia” that invades and occupies and destroys and kills, and “Ukraine,” your country, that stands against this, in defense of its freedom and in defense of freedom in general. And while no nation is pure, your struggle, on the Maidan back in 2014 and on the front lines today, is just. And those who support your barbaric aggressor are . . . themselves barbaric aggressors.
Unfortunately for you, and for me, and for all we value together, it appears that the barbarous aggressors now include the U.S. government. This is something new, especially for you, and I am ashamed to admit it. While the U.S. has done some very terrible things in the world, in Europe it has long defended freedom—until now. Were it not for the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy in the summer of 1944, who knows what might have befallen Camus and his comrades, or the fate of Europe more generally? True, the Soviet Union also played its part in the defeat of fascism—as did many of your ancestors, who fought as citizens of one of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And after that war, it reaped its reward—at the expense of your country, and the countries of Eastern Europe. But as you struggled for human rights and democracy, the U.S., whatever its flaws, represented a beacon of hope. I know this. I know what it meant to my many Eastern European friends back in 1989. And I know now how badly even the barest semblance of that is now missed.
Trump the brother of Putin and Orban has today brought us to an abyss. And as a result, you and yours are literally in peril, and your Eastern Europe neighbors–places where many friends live–are shaken.
Toward the end of my class discussion of Camus’s “Letters,” I invited the students to think about the situation that Camus faced as he wrote those letters under Nazi occupation. The students expressed appreciation and even admiration for Camus. I then posed a question: “what would you say, now, if I told you that Camus was a propagandist for liberal imperialism, and that France had really started the Second World War by contributing to the humiliation of Germany, and Hitler’s Germany was merely defending itself from this liberal aggression? What would you say to that?” My students were confused. Incredulous. Because they knew that that was not true. I then pointed out to them that Nazi propagandists claimed something just like that back in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, and those ideologues had their supporters throughout Europe, including France, and even in the U.S. And there was no way of knowing, in 1939 or 1942 or even 1944, how that conflict of interpretations would play out. Nazism was in fact defeated, and Hitlerian lies with it.
And then I fast forwarded to today, and to Donald Trump’s statements–lying statements–that very week, about how your country had started the war with Putin in 2022, and how your president is a dictator, and how Putin is a reasonable guy who simply wants his country to be respected.
The students got the point. They left that classroom having learned something about the history of fascism back in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, and the history of something very like fascism right now. And they were thinking. And talking. And wanting to talk more.
I had done my job as a teacher.
But what about my job as a citizen and as a human being, or simply as a friend who cares about your fate and those of your people? How to make some difference, now, in a situation that really is so bleak, for your country and for mine?
I am no Albert Camus. And even if I were, I cannot write, with a sense of real confidence, as a spokesperson for a noble Resistance that seems to be ascendant. I write as a citizen of the most powerful country in the world, whose government is now aligned against pretty much everything you and I both value, and whose political compatriots are confused and without any real power.
One thing I can do is to share with you these words from Camus’s second letter to his German “friend,” because I imagine that they could be your words to some imaginary Russian “friend,” and perhaps they can furnish some comfort, and confidence, in the face of the real adversity you now face:
“Death strikes everywhere and at random. In the war we are fighting, courage steps up and volunteers, and every day you are shooting down our purest spirits . . . You have never known what to select, but you know what to destroy. And we, who call ourselves defenders of the spirit, know nevertheless that the spirit can die when the force crushing it is great enough. But we have faith in another force. In raining bullets on those silent faces . . . you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth. But you are forgetting the obstinacy that makes France fight against time. That hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments; our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets.”
I can only hope that the hopeless hope of which Camus wrote back in 1943 can truly sustain you in the weeks and months to come. For it will not be easy.
Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.
This piece was originally published on ‘Democracy in Dark Times,’ on February 28, 2025 and on Democracy Seminar on March 1st, 2025.
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