Just want to point out that there's no such thing as turning on a wind turbine at full speed reverse. It's not a fan.
Potential mechanisms for damaging one include mucking with the brakes (as in the article), changing blade pitch, disabling some kind of cooling system, etc.
Big AC windmills actually are started up as fans with their blades set to 'coarse' for maximum torque. What happens is that the grid is used to get them up to speed, they become sync-locked to the grid (same frequency) and then any excess power the wind imparts to the machine will be passed off to the grid.
If the machine would drop slightly below the 0 line of power produced the power company would still operate it as a fan until this situation persists for too long and the losses accumulate, then the mill is set to 'coarse' if the pitch is variable and allowed to coast to a stop or some low RPM waiting for the wind to pick up again.
All kinds of trickery (variable pitch, DC systems, maximum-power-point-tracking) and so on is used to expand the useful envelope.
So yes, they're also fans. But mechanical safety is a big thing in windmill design and most likely some FPGA or other hardware lock-out would stop you from being able to command a typical windmill from becoming an 8 MW desk fan.
Hurricane on demand, the evil part of me now wants to know what would happen. At a guess it wouldn't do much because the mechanism is rated to produce an X amount of power so it likely can handle sourcing it as well as long as enough air flows over the coils of the generator. As soon as those get too hot the failsafe will kick in again and the mill goes flat (totally neutral blade setting, the machine won't be moved by the wind like that) and stops.
When the wind is blowing really, really fast the controller will change the pitch of the blades to prevent them from spinning too fast. Prevent that and it redlines, resulting in anything from worn parts to catastrophic failure of the structure.