[vkou]

Well, of course they have to, it's kind of hard to run a regime that murders and tortures and robs people without, you know, at least pretending that you're doing it for their own good.

They also use 'upholding the law' as a common excuse, but that hardly results in "the guise of having laws or some other similar nonsense is an entry point to authoritarianism' becoming a reasonable thing to say.