This Week I learned that: Its always better to pay someone to do what you can’t or don’t want to wether its killing your best friend or waging ideological wars, and it’s possible consequences.

Getting other people to do something you don’t want to is very common in history and today. If you have the money for it why should you do some basic tasks that you would rather just pay someone to do? This scales from people all the way back to governments. When people talk about war in the late 20th to 21st century they often are refer to “proxy wars”.

These were incredibly common from global superpowers like the US and USSR who couldn’t fight each other directly through the world destroying power they possessed so instead they got smaller countries to do it for them. Proxy wars are when foreign powers put two smaller powers against each other while funding the side they want to win. There are many examples of this like Korea, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba, Yom Kippur and many more. 

There are many ways this can back fire on a nation like the Mujahideen with the US in Afghanistan as the US funded rebels eventually became part of Al Qaeda.

Macbeth does this too, unable to kill Banquo himself thus sending murderers to do it for him. His motives for this are to not to be any more suspect as to the mysterious disappearance of all of his political rivals. There is the argument that Macbeth was with the murderers as the unnamed murderer number three but I don’t think it was him as then there would have been no point for him to be so specific with his orders for the murderers. He could not attack Banquo directly as if Fleance were to escape he would know for certain that Macbeth was the murderer.

Playing people off of one another for personal gain is not new for Macbeth as we see him blame and kill the guards for the death of Duncan, clearing himself of involvement by pushing the action on to a different group with less power. This is similar to how the US and USSR would push blame on smaller nations for wars that they could not personally fight.

The motives of Macbeth and the US in their proxy’s are similar.