“Lest we forget” is engraved on many a war memorial. But across Europe, as far-right parties rise in one election after another, too many voters have forgotten how racist extremism led to war and the Holocaust. That is why a group of older German women are taking to the streets of Berlin in trademark hand-knitted woolly hats, with placards reading: “Omas gegen Rechts” – Grannies against the right.

They protest regularly against the AfD – Alternative für Deutschland – the nationalist party that made alarming gains with its anti-Muslim campaign in Germany’s 2017 elections. “I was born in 1943. I remember the ruins of destroyed houses and destroyed streets,” Cordula Grafahrend tells the Daily Telegraph. “For us, it’s easy to see what we have gained in security, peace and freedom. Our children don’t know what it is to live with your life in danger. It’s our responsibility to tell them and our grandchildren.” The owner of the cafe where they meet sees all the echoes of the Nazis: “Back then it was against the Jews, now it’s against the Muslims. But they use the same language. They use words like Volk and Heimat.

Elsewhere, in the United States, a caravan called “Grannies Respond” travelled 2,000 miles along the Mexican border last August to protest at the brutal separation of migrant children from their parents, while a group of grandmothers were arrested in Seattle in the summer for demonstrating against a Shell ship embarking to drill the Arctic: Shell has since pulled out.

Old voters are in bad odour in Britain, viewed by many as the main culprits in the Brexit vote. They are the lucky postwar generation that had it all – cheap homes now worth a fortune, steady jobs, unions, free education: they pay no national insurance and this government bribes them with triple-locked state pensions. No surprise if generations below look up with envy and sometimes anger. Maybe it’s time for a British Grannies Against the Right to redress the balance? Not all older people – not you, dear Guardian readers – voted to eject the young from their European future. Plenty of 1968-ers are still angry as hell, out there protesting, forming the backbone of local Labour parties, green groups and leftist causes.

From the women at Greenham Common and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to the fracking protesters of today, older women have long been at the forefront of protests. Best of all, in 2002, 600 middle-aged Itsekiri tribeswomen of the Niger Delta stormed Chevron Texaco’s terminal in 2002 and brought it to a 10-day standstill. They won pledges to improve sanitation, supply electricity, schools, clinics, town halls, chicken and fish farms. How? With a traditional “shaming” protest: they took all their clothes off. Come 29 March, such tactics may be the last resort to save us from Brexit.