Distant Thunder

At HNN, there is a note about the 1943 Bengali famine that took 3 million lives.

The causes were complex, but essentially because of the war, the price of rice went up and folks couldn't afford to buy it; so they starved while the rice was exported and local British officials didn't seem to think that this was a problem. (sorta like what happened 100 years earlier in Ireland).

Satyajit Ray's impressive film "distant thunder" about the famine is available on YOUTUBE, with subtitles.

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another interesting post at Historynet asks if the Middle East's problems were caused by Lawrence of Arabia.

actually, there is a good argument that the downfall and dismemberment of the tottering but multi-ethnic Ottoman and Austria/Hungary empires after the First World War were bad things (to make new states, millions of people were ethnically cleansed and sent elsewhere to settle), but it was not caused by a single person.