It is said that such pragmatic and necessary thing as toilet paper took its familiar look about 150 years ago. Later it became clear that blank sheet is always a blank sheet and you can put information on it in order to gain direct and indirect profit. Soon all kinds of entertaining reading materials and advertisements were printed on toilet paper. Such products weren’t just sold faster but helped to sell other product as well.
Hard to tell who had the idea to use toilet paper in military propaganda first, but it seems to happen during WWI, when Americans and French produced toilet paper with cartoon image of Kaiser.
The first blow is half the battle, thus when WWII started, Hitler portraits on a T.P could have become a proper collectible due to their variety, and soon Mussolini, Tojo and other popular characters from Axis high command joined the Fuhrer. Interestingly, examples of soft paper with an image of Churchill or Roosevelt couldn’t be found – whether every piece of it was used for the direct purpose or simply their opponents were already too busy.
On the one hand a joke that was repeated twice becomes absurd; on the other hand why give up on solution that works? After the end of WWII in some places there was toilet paper for sale with pictures of Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Castro, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi faces. This sparkling sense of humor marathon hasn’t ended to this day.
