I traveled to Thailand a couple of times this year along with my colleagues from the day job to conduct training seminars for expatriate Burmese journalists working for Mizzima News. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least, and even though the training schedule was packed, there was time to shoot the breeze a little with the Burmese journos. In fact, I was even able to ask them about how they felt about the last Rambo film, which was set in Burma and filmed in Thailand. Apparently, the pirated DVD of the movie was a huge hit among the Burmese, and the guys I talked to were even proud to share that they knew fellow Burmese exiles who scored gigs as extras in the Stallone film.

Some of the people we met from Burma had been jailed for their activism, something they shared with my boss, Malou Mangahas, who was a political detainee as a college student leader during the Martial Law years. They would discuss parallels between the Burmese junta and the Marcos regime, talking about, among other things, the role of the press in the ouster of Marcos, but it was mostly to provide a glimmer of hope for our friends from Burma. After all, Marcos was ousted, wasn’t he?

All those discussions came back to me this afternoon after reading this story in The Guardian about how, according to Wikileaks cables, the leader of Burma’s military junta, Than Shwe, considered spending $1 billion to purchase the Manchester United football club only several months after cyclone Nargis devastated the country. The general decided not to go ahead with the move because it would “look bad,” and instead ordered the creation of a new national football league.

According to the report, Than Shwe used the stick-and-carrot approach to convince the country’s richest businessmen to put up teams in the league, which required them to bring in foreign players and rack up an exorbitant payroll. One team had a budget of $2 million for 2009, an obscene amount of money in a country with a per-capita income of only $1,000 (to compare, the Philippines’ per-capita income is $3,300). In exchange, the businessmen who owned the teams were expected to receive lucrative government contracts and import permits. A regime crony, Zaw Zaw, meanwhile chairs Burma’s football federation in charge of organizing its national team.

It’s all reminiscent of the Martial Law regime, when the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos used basketball not just to distract people from the country’s numerous problems, but also as a tool for his propaganda. Rafe Bartholomew drew that line very clearly in Pacific Rims, where he described basketball games as the people’s outlet to all their life’s frustrations – they could shout at the officials all they wanted, without getting arrested as they would in real life. There were also tales of the popular Crispa Redmanizers barnstorming the country to stump for the dictator, led by their coach, presidential son-in-law Tommy Manotoc in his “I ♥ Marcos” shirts. Danding Cojuangco, a prominent crony of the regime, was assigned project director for basketball, organizing and bankrolling the country’s national team.

Coincidentally, tomorrow night, the Philippine national football team will go up against Burma in the AFF Suzuki Cup.

And with all the usual “basketball vs. soccer” discussions cropping up once more after the Azkals’ rousing win last Sunday versus Vietnam, I end up wondering: Does the opiate that the masses choose really matter all that much?