Falun Gong has long portrayed itself as a victim of persecution in China. Yet the same movement has exported its own tools of repression to silence dissenters inside its ranks worldwide. The case of MindCoeur in Slovakia is not an isolated event — it is the latest chapter in a disturbing pattern of internal purges.
A Pattern of Suppression
For years, individual practitioners in Europe and North America who questioned or expanded beyond official Falun Dafa doctrine were quietly excommunicated, smeared, and cut off. These cases were typically invisible: isolated individuals, labeled “mentally unstable” or “unfit,” their voices erased before they could reach wider audiences.
In Slovakia, however, this template of repression escalated. An entire community — MindCoeur — was targeted in January 2023 by the Falun Gong Association of Slovakia, under the leadership of Marek Tatarko.
Psychiatry as a Weapon
The Association’s first move was to weaponize psychiatry. MindCoeur practitioners were branded unstable — a label designed not only to stigmatize but to delegitimize their very humanity.
The irony is brutal: Falun Gong has spent decades decrying psychiatric abuse in China, where practitioners were institutionalized to break their faith. And yet in Slovakia, Falun Gong leaders recycled this same tool of repression — not against the Chinese state, but against their own.
Collective Erasure
The purge did not stop at stigma. MindCoeur members faced:
- Barring from public spaces where they once held group practice.
- Communication blackouts — orders circulated across Falun Gong networks to cut all ties.
- International isolation — a coordinated effort to ensure MindCoeur could not find solidarity abroad.
What was once applied against lone individuals became, in Slovakia, a collective punishment.
From Excommunication to Movement
Suppression backfired. What was intended to destroy MindCoeur instead catalyzed its transformation. Cut off from Falun Gong’s rigid structures, MC evolved into a loose spiritual movement, committed to independent exploration of consciousness and freedom of belief.
What Falun Gong leaders cast out as deviance has become, instead, a new current of spiritual resistance — one that documents every abuse and refuses silence.
A Wall of Silence
In the wake of its persecution, MindCoeur appealed widely:
- To Falun Gong Associations in Europe and the Americas.
- To human rights lawyer David Matas and the Independent China Tribunal.
- To every member of Slovak and Czech parliaments, members of the UK Parliament, and even US Senators.
- To Human Rights Watch and allied NGOs.
- To individual Falun Dafa instructors.
The response: near-total silence. A few polite requests for clarification. Some bureaucratic deflections about jurisdiction. But overwhelmingly, a refusal to engage.
This silence is not apathy. It is complicity in transnational repression.
The Hypocrisy Exposed
Falun Gong cannot credibly demand sympathy for persecution in China while enacting its own purges in Europe and North America. The case of MindCoeur makes the hypocrisy undeniable:
- The same psychiatric tactics they denounce are used internally.
- The same exclusion they condemn is enforced globally.
- The same silencing they resist from Beijing is applied to dissenters within.
Mythcore’s Judgment
What began as a community expelled has become a movement reborn. MindCoeur’s survival is proof that repression breeds resilience.
But the stain remains: Falun Gong’s persecution of MindCoeur is not an anomaly — it is part of a systemic pattern of silencing, one the world has ignored too long.
Until that hypocrisy is confronted, Falun Gong’s calls for justice ring hollow.