I think there's some truth to your counterarguments 1 and 2. Young people are easier to sway into any change-oriented movement, so any push for sweeping change will have a lot of youth behind it, even if it's an older person pulling the strings and reaping the benefits.

It was the youthful Red Guards who were guilty of the worst Cultural Revolution atrocities, and Pol Pot's regime was even more reliant on adolescent murderers killing everyone who had criminal traditional values or had received a traditional education.

In contrast, Deng Xiaoping was over 70 years old when he instituted his post Cultural Revolution reforms.

Aside from teaching basic mathematical skills and literacy, the major goal of the new educational system was to instill revolutionary values in the young. For a regime at war with most of Cambodia's traditional values, this meant that it was necessary to create a gap between the values of the young and the values of the nonrevolutionary old.

The regime recruited children to spy on adults. The pliancy of the younger generation made them, in the Angkar's words, the "dictatorial instrument of the party."[citation needed] In 1962 the communists had created a special secret organisation, the Democratic Youth League, that, in the early 1970s, changed its name to the Communist Youth League of Kampuchea. Pol Pot considered Youth League alumni as his most loyal and reliable supporters, and used them to gain control of the central and of the regional CPK apparatus. The powerful Khieu Thirith, minister of social action, was responsible for directing the youth movement.

Hardened young cadres, many little more than twelve years of age, were enthusiastic accomplices in some of the regime's worst atrocities. Sihanouk, who was kept under virtual house arrest in Phnom Penh between 1976 and 1978, wrote in War and Hope that his youthful guards, having been separated from their families and given a thorough indoctrination, were encouraged to play cruel games involving the torture of animals. Having lost parents, siblings, and friends in the war and lacking the Buddhist values of their elders, the Khmer Rouge youth also lacked the inhibitions that would have dampened their zeal for revolutionary terror.

The Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Italofascists were also Young Turk movements, although the generation gap was not quite so extreme. In the case of the Nazis, the weakened conservative Junker elite (epitomized by the elderly Paul von Hindenburg) first tried to reign them in, then tried to use them, and wound up losing everything to them.