I'm not going to write my own account of this, but mainly link to others who have written some pretty thorough summaries of a shocking history. In sum, a who's who list of prominent 1980s conservatives were horribly, horribly wrong about Apartheid and those who opposed it. When we say "white supremacy," we often think of skinheads and neo-Nazis with tattoos. These conservatives supported the kind of society that such white supremacists dream of creating. I don't have any personal anger against these people, but I do think it's important to remember what they said and did in public.
At Foreign Policy, Sam Kleiner names a lot of names and shows just how wide and deep US conservative ambivalence about opposing Apartheid ran.
At The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts the support for the Apartheid regime by core elements of intellectual conservatism.
At The New Republic, Jordan Michael Smith focuses on the personal attacks of many US conservatives against Nelson Mandela in particular.
One thing to notice in these accounts is the ways in which words like "terrorist" and "communist" are used as if they denote inherently evil and unchanging entities. Such descriptions blind those using them and their audiences, since they don't address concrete realities that shape the nature of political struggles. (That being said, I don't think that "conservatism" itself is responsible for supporting Apartheid, but it is pretty disturbing that such influential people who have described themselves as conservatives did so little to oppose such an unjustifiable social system.)
Update: And then there are the British conservatives.
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