Exactly. The 3rd quote on my FR profile page:
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere …Given the roots of socialism, and its history, there is really nothing sincere about it. The ideology is always about cradle-to-grave totalitarianism and no freedom.
[Karl Marx] envisioned a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into instant action by signals from their masters. He wanted a race of men who would no longer depend upon free will, morals, ethics or conscience for guidance. Perhaps without realizing it, Marx was setting out to create a race of human beings conditioned to think like criminals.That is the endgame of socialism in all its forms. And that is how far it goes back in history.
Producing such a race had been the dream of power-hungry men for more than 4,000 years. Nimrod had projected the design, Plato polished it, Saint-Simon sublimated it—now Marx materialized it.
Today, this breed of criminally-conditioned man walks the earth in sufficient numbers to conquer countries or continents, to change laws and boundaries, to decree war or peace. …
— The Naked Communist