as its consequences for the international system, namely that the war perpetuated a system in which power and force trump diplomacy and law. He summarised this view in Hegemony or Survival, writing: Views on the Cuban embargo In February 2009, Chomsky described the publicly stated U.S. goal of bringing "democracy to the Cuban people" as "unusually vulgar propaganda". In Chomsky's view, the U.S. embargo of Cuba has actually achieved its stated purpose. The goal of the embargo according to Chomsky has been to implement "intensive U.S. terror operations" and "harsh economic warfare" in order to cause "rising discomfort among hungry Cubans" in the hope that out of desperation they would overthrow the regime. In lieu of this goal, Chomsky believes that "U.S. policy has achieved its actual goals" in causing "bitter suffering among Cubans, impeding economic development, and undermining moves towards more internal democracy." In Chomsky's view, the real "threat of Cuba" is that successful independent development on the island might stimulate others who suffer from similar problems to follow the same course, thus causing the "system of U.S. domination" to unravel. Turkish oppression of Kurds Chomsky has been very critical of Turkey's policies in regards to their Kurdish population, while also denouncing the military aid given to the Turkish government by the United States. Such aid Chomsky states allowed Turkey during the 1990s to conduct "US-backed terrorist campaigns" in southeast Turkey, which Chomsky believes "rank among the most terrible crimes of the grisly 1990s", featuring "tens of thousands dead" and "every imaginable form of barbaric torture." In 2016 he was one of the signatories of a petition of the Academics for Peace called “We will not be a party to this crime!” demanding a peaceful solution for the Kurdish Turkish conflict. Chomsky has described contemporary Turkey as a degrading democracy: Chomsky and his publishers against the Turkish Courts In 2002 the Turkish state indicted a Turkish publisher, Fatih Tas, for distributing a collection of Chomsky's essays under the title "American Intervention". The state charged that the book "promoted separatism" violating Article 8 of the Turkish Anti-Terror Law. One essay in the book was a reprint of a speech that Chomsky had made in Toledo, Ohio containing material claiming that the Turkish state had brutally repressed its Kurdish population. Prosecutors cited the following passages as particularly offensive: At the request of Turkish activists, Chomsky petitioned the Turkish courts to name