It's interesting that of the five South Koreans interviewed here by the BBC about the repercussions of the Cheonan sinking, three were sceptical of the official conclusion that North Korea was responsible. Student Gyuhang Kim, for instance:
I and many others suspect the South Korean government of deliberately accusing North Korea, even of making up the proof.
We are well aware of the anti-North Korean sentiment of the government and do not trust the official report at all.
The mark "number 1" on the front part of the torpedo cannot survive such a blow. Some news sites doubting the reliability of the proof have been shut down for no reason and we suspect government censorship.
I also think the government is ruining years of hard work of former presidents, especially Kim Dae-jung, who have worked so hard to take a first step towards reunification.
Not only has President Lee Myung-bak destroyed years of efforts for reunification but he is also endangering South Korea's economy and civilians by risking a war with the North - the prelude to a nuclear or third world war.
Rumours are spreading about the cause of the sinking of the ship - such as a possible mistake with an American submarine during a joint exercise, which was covered up by the South Korean government in order to discredit North Korea.
Conspiracy theories are to be expected, no doubt - but from 60% of the population? It all rather ties in with this pre-Cheonan article on the general apathy in South Korea about the issue of North Korean atrocities, with a former inmate of the gulag system like Kang Cheol-hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, reporting that many of the South Koreans he spoke to refused to believe such prison camps existed.
Now here's B.R.Myers (via), on South Korea's collective shrug:
Up until the late 1980s, right-wing governments resorted to North Korea scares so often that many people now refuse to believe any stories about the regime, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. If President Lee thought he could allay doubts with an especially thorough investigation into the sinking, he was mistaken. Left-wing newspapers now accuse him of postponing the announcement of the investigation’s results to exert maximum influence on next week’s regional elections.
It would be unfair to characterize these skeptics as pro-Pyongyang, but there is more sympathy for North Korea here than foreigners commonly realize. As a university student in West Berlin in the 1980s, I had a hard time finding even a Marxist with anything nice to say about East Germany. In South Korea, however, the North’s human rights abuses are routinely shrugged off with reference to its supposedly superior nationalist credentials. One often hears, for example, the mistaken claim that Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, purged his republic of former Japanese collaborators, in alleged contrast to the morally tainted South....
South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel. Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak. (Kim Jong-il has a distinct advantage here: his subjects are more likely to equate their state with the race itself.) Thus few South Koreans feel personally affected by the torpedo attack.
Besides, Koreans in both the North and the South tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil. The sinking of the Cheonan is widely viewed here as an almost spontaneous byproduct of inter-Korean tension — a regrettable aberration that should not be made too much of. The left attributes the recent increase of tension to President Lee’s rejection of his predecessors’ accommodationist Sunshine Policy. Yet even the conservative news media talk of the attack in terms of an “error” that the North should own up to, not a cold-blooded act. Students in my classes tend to refer to the sinking as an “accident.”
This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously. During the street protests against American beef imports in the wake of a mad cow disease scare in 2008, posters of a child-poisoning Uncle Sam were all the rage. It is illuminating to compare those two anti-American frenzies with the small and geriatric protests against Pyongyang that have taken place in Seoul in recent weeks.